Sam Harris
About
Author and podcaster; described as an 'archenemy' who endorsed Taleb's pandemic caution
Claims by Sam Harris (20 of 5,129)
Reality keeps getting a vote, so pragmatism must eventually win
Pragmatism, basic sanity, and intellectual honesty must eventually prevail because reality—economic, epidemiological, or geopolitical—keeps asserting itself; one can only delude oneself for partisan or self-serving reasons for so long before bumping into hard objects.
Newsom's pandering history makes him a weak presidential candidate
Gavin Newsom is not an especially viable presidential candidate because his history of pandering to far-left activist interests in California—positions he cannot now disavow—plus the albatross of California's reputation, undermine him, even as his trollish partisan engagement with Trump gains attention.
Being a jihadist is being a spiritual James Bond
The jihadi worldview is compelling because it combines supercharged religious meaning with the satisfactions of gang membership, channels testosterone-driven sexual repression and dissatisfaction into becoming a warrior for God, and promises an explicitly sexualized eternal reward (paradise with virgins), checking every box in the male search for self-aggrandizement.
Cornered feeling plus arms enables violence
What is dangerous about people who feel cornered, who believe they are making a last stand against an inevitable race war, is the heightened potential for violence—and what makes America uniquely scary in this respect is how heavily armed the population is.
Left's identity politics fuels right-wing populism
The right is being energized by the left's swing into identity politics, and Harris's main fear is that the left will misplay this moment so badly—for example by treating any concern about immigration or a defensible national border as synonymous with racism—that it will not only deliver four more years of Trump but convince ordinary, non-racist people that intolerant right-wing populism is the only honest voice on crucial points.
Inconvenient scientific data won't align with politics
There is no guarantee that everything science discovers about biology, intelligence, or the effect of culture on people will align with our political sensitivities, and the left's refusal to have an adult conversation about all the variables that may account for unequal representation—insisting the only explanation is racism or sexism—vacates the space into which dishonest but partly-truthful figures like Jared Taylor step.
First victims of jihadism are Muslims
The first victims of jihadism and Islamism are Muslims themselves—liberal Muslims, free thinkers, women, gays, and also conservative, very pious people who are not Islamist or jihadist—yet because people hear 'Islamist' and assume it means 'Muslim,' they fail to make the necessary distinctions between the religion, its adherents, and the political ideology.
ISIS is a plausible version of Islam, not a fringe cult
The Islamic State is not the 'Scientology of Islam'—not a fringe cult—but offers an all-too-plausible version of Islam directly linked to the actual doctrine of jihad found in the Quran and hadith and to specific ideas about martyrdom and paradise, so the problem the Muslim world must grapple with is rendering that interpretation less plausible and less contagious.
Saudi petrodollars steroidally promoted Wahhabism
Although friction between strands of faith has existed for a thousand years, the fanatic, intolerant brand of Islam has been exaggerated tremendously over the last 40 years by Saudi Arabia using its petrodollars to actively promote its Wahhabi version of what Islam actually is.
Concern about ideas is not racism
Islam is a set of ideas and Muslims are not a race—one can be any race and be Muslim, or convert at any time—so race is the wrong lens for this debate; conflating any criticism of ideas, culture, or behaviors within a religious culture with racism abandons the most vulnerable people (such as a girl killed over pseudo-honor) to the starkest mistreatment.
Islam must collide with modernity like Christianity did
Islam has to undergo a full collision with modernity, secular values, and scientific thinking in the way Christianity has been doing for 200 years; while Christianity is still a mess with crazy adherents, it is far less bad than in the 14th century, and a poll finding zero percent of British-born Muslims find homosexuality morally acceptable shows the scale of the problem that must change.
Avoid the worst case of ceding sense-making to extremists
The most toxic situation, to be avoided at all costs, is when a real problem that could be easily understood by people of goodwill becomes taboo to discuss, so that the only people left making sense about it are figures like Richard Spencer or Jared Taylor (on race) or, analogously, the only honest voices on jihadism become those on the right who gain energy from other biases.
Clinton's refusal to name jihadism aided Trump
Hillary Clinton's refusal, after the Orlando shooting, to acknowledge any link between Omar Mateen's act and his religious beliefs—instead only admonishing people not to give in to racism—was a spectacular, self-inflicted political own goal that contributed to Trump's rise, because honesty about the master variable of doctrine was the only candid alternative on offer.
Some deny anyone believes in paradise
Harris repeatedly meets intellectuals, anthropologists, and journalists—disproportionately liberal—who are so in denial about the power of ideas that they deny anyone has ever blown himself up in expectation of paradise, insisting the drivers of human behavior are always economic and that religion is always merely a pretext, a denial as crazy as if a consensus held that the KKK's hatred had nothing to do with race.
Motivations are a mixture, but pure cases exist
While most extremists are driven by a messy mixture of internal vulnerabilities and external causes (and apparently advantaged figures like doctors and engineers turn out to have other things going on), it is also true that pure cases exist—psychologically normal people who, having been victimized by nothing, get committed to an ideology they believe is true and follow its dictates logically into a recipe for sociopathy.
Chronocentrism Was Delusional But This Moment May Differ
Although every past generation's belief that it lived at an especially significant moment (chronocentrism) was almost always delusional, the present pace and asymptotic nature of change—sharpened especially by AI—makes it genuinely hard to argue that this moment is not uniquely important.
Let Billionaires Be Maximally Effective Even If Lavish
If a highly philanthropic billionaire like Bill Gates is more effective—able to think, travel, and meet funders—by flying private and living lavishly, then we should want him to live as freely and happily as possible in a way commensurate with maximizing the good he does, rather than begrudging his personal spending which is a rounding error on his total impact.
Empathy Is Overrated as a Moral Guide
Empathy is overrated as a guide to doing good because the cause that triggers the strongest emotional response is not necessarily the most pressing or the one where a remedy can do the most good; one's emotional life should be treated as a separate piece of information—not nothing, but not everything—requiring dispassionate analysis.
My Notes
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