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

'''Eric:'''    I've been watching you transition.  

'''Eric:'''  That's new.

'''Eric:'''  Like years five ago you were somewhere else.  

'''Eric:'''  Well I was on, I've been on the New York Times since the '80s, um...

'''Eric:'''  Yeah, I was very early to this party for...

'''Eric:'''  It's a good question. Depends. Worse isn't the right word, in my opinion. The way I would play with it is I'd say that its problem has always been the same, which is narrative-driven journalism. And the first clear indication I have of this, I think, was a story about Woodstock in which the paper told the reporter...

'''Eric:'''  I’m 53, Sir.

'''Eric:''' No, no, no, no, no! I don't remember this as a three-year-old!

'''Eric:'''  Yeah, no, no, it's not that. I remember reading - I will clarify - I remember reading a story about the journalist being sent, who was sent to cover Woodstock by The Times, being told, 'Write about the filth and the hippies and the unkemptness, and...'

'''Eric:'''  Ok

'''Eric:''' Well...

'''Eric:'''    00:06:17      I'm really tempted to call it... Yeah, but I'm not, I'm not going back. Gambit declined.

   

'''Eric:''' The, what I recall of the story was, is that The Times that told the reporter what sort of story to file, and the reporter called up The Times and said, 'I refuse. I'm seeing something different. I'm seeing something inspiring and heart-opening and I'm not going to file that story. So, if that's what you want, how...'  

'''Eric:''' And I have cholera. So, I think that the narrative aspect of The New York Times has been both its structural reason for its importance and the fatal flaw that in essence it carries these very long narrative arcs that come from the editor - the editorial function at The Times. And that those are written in some sense before the facts are known. And so, the facts are then fit to the narratives. And then when the counter-narratives occur, The Times really either doesn't report the story as is, and they really couldn't handle the-the situation that happened with my brother because it was exactly counter-narrative or then they distort based on the idea that they need to push things back into the narrative.

'''Eric:'''    00:07:24      So I think that has always been present. And there are particular kinds of stories that The Times writes that I find absolutely - well, I'll go so far as to say - borderline evil. And what they do is they crowd out whatever natural inquiry process would be happening.  

'''Eric:''' So I'm happy to get into a couple of examples about that. But I would say I think that the problem has been there at The New York Times all along. There are some new things that I see as happening there, like a conflict between the old-line journalists with the new line of sort of, you know, Brooklyn-based writers who are telling us how to, how to think.  

'''Eric:'''  What do you make of it?

'''Eric:'''  Trump is saving their business.  

'''Eric:'''  Sure. But again, that the, I, I guess what I want to play with is, is there something special about institutions? Imagine that you can get all of the interesting articles that you like somewhere, and somebody's saying something interesting, you can piece them together. But the fact that there's no institutional home where you can trust that, like, the Office of Management and Budget or something or...

'''Eric:''' ...and you find the same people on Twitter.

'''Eric:'''  Well, you could just see their, their bias, like they're not hiding it on Twitter and then they hide it when they're in their journalistic frame.

'''Eric:'''  Well, I agree with that. Although I would say you and I are very split on this, so put a placeholder, maybe we'll get back to it.

'''Eric:'''  Maybe not. I'm  more worried about the loss of things like Nature and Science than I am The New York Times. I'm now worried that there is nothing, and even in the hard sciences almost that can stand up to the onslaught of political pressure creeping in to everything that has to be able to say no, that we've lost the ability to tell people to screw off if they're wrong.  

'''Eric:''' (laughter) "fifteen minutes"!

'''Eric:'''  That's a recurring issue.  

'''Eric:'''    00:17:10      Well, I think we're trying to do harm to ourselves.  

'''Eric:'''    I think that the idea, yeah. Sometimes I think about Trump as the doctor who has to break a bone that has miss - has been mis-set in the hopes that it can finally heal properly. And this is one of the places where you are...

'''Eric:'''    00:17:44      Right. Or you know, is it doctored in folklore and from some non-accredited...

   

'''Eric:'''  (laughter) Oh, that's good. I mean, that does...  

'''Eric:'''  So I think you get Trump wrong.

'''Eric:'''  And it's not, I see what you see and it's maddening. It's driving me crazy. The idea of spending four more precious years of my dwindling life, talking about whatever Trump less said or tweeted or worried that I don't know what would happen if we actually had a five-alarm fire in the U S that had to be handled.

'''Eric:'''  Well, I think that you were slow to give him his due. I mean, of course, as you know, I wrote this essay on kayfabe anticipating that professional wrestling was going to turn out to be incredibly important. And in fact, I thought it was going to determine the presidency - that was a, a belief I had that understanding how lies play within the mind and how hypocrisy works and then a concept called namespaces out of Python programming and the like, how we compartmentalize, led me to believe that in essence we were - I had seen these other candidacies in other countries in which people seem not to be able to distinguish an actor from the character that they played, you know, whatnot. And so, I, I believed that the system of laws within professional wrestling told us what was possible. And Trump actually sort of came out of the WWE through his association with, with the McMahon family.  

'''Eric:'''  And I believe that he actually understood deep things that psychology departments will wake up to 20 years from now.  

'''Eric:'''  Let me just...  

'''Eric:'''  Well, but that's wrong.  

'''Eric:'''  I bet if you and I had a couple of old-fashioneds between us and we sat down with a thousand of his tweets, we could figure out that they're recurrent structures and we could write an Eliza program to generate them to, to tangle Democrats. I think that there's much more method to the madness. And I, I don't have to go full Scott Adams, ''Scott, I know you're out there somewhere,'' to, to say that everything is intentional and brilliant. I just think he's got a, you know, it was for years, I said that if you wanted to win an election against a Democrat, you just would talk about the nuclear family, let them correct you to nuclear, and then you'd win because you'd come across as an ass.  

'''Eric:''' So I think that there is a certain amount of method that you were slow to give, give him credit for. But I think you're probably inching towards the idea that if he's not an evil genius, he has some evil genius.  

'''Eric:'''  All right.

'''Eric:'''  But in the rallies that he likes, the rallies are a feedback mechanism.

'''Eric:'''  So he knows, he knows that the feedback that he's getting from the press, in general, has a constant distortion. And so by holding a rally, he can figure out to some ext..... I mean, it's like constant AB testing.

'''Eric:''' He was!

'''Eric:''' No he's cancelled.

'''Eric:'''  I disagree with this, Sam. I think you're getting this wrong. This is what I think might be interesting. I'm happy to be...

'''Eric:'''  I'm happy to be wrong, too.  

'''Eric:'''  I think we're still in the stage of being so angry at Bill Clintonism...

'''Eric:'''  That we just want to know you're not owned. We want something that convinces us that it's not taking orders...

'''Eric:'''  Believe me, I think about this. I don't know. I ha - I haven't followed all the details. It's possible he's compromised and under direct control.  

'''Eric:'''  You see, you don't carry the same anger and passion that I do for getting rid of the rot that was the American center. In other words, I believe ... one of the things that I find very confusing is, is that you and I, I think would normally have been called centrists, right? But we're not crypt... we're not klepto centrists. I mean, I've never been in a position to, you know, to loot the treasury from the position of being a centrist.  

'''Eric:'''  So the interesting thing about the center is that the center produces the, the blank canvas of America on which we get to paint. So I'm not really super excited to get a politician that makes me swoon. I want somebody to just gesso a canvas so that we can build all of the, you know, companies and nonprofits and do all the beautiful work that makes this country amazing. I'm not trying to get my entertainment from government.   

'''Eric:''' Yeah but it's not the elitism. It's the fact that these people have been picking our pockets and they've been divorcing us from each other.

'''Eric:'''  It's not the libtards that they...Sam. I'm really trying to get at something. I may be wrong, so forgive me if I'm, if I'm going off on a tangent, but I really think that there was something much more evil. It wasn't just that people were sneering at us over crudité. You know, it's like, it's that they were picking our pockets. They were divorcing us from each other. They came up with a bullshit ideology, if you will, of the, of the Davos flavor that said, you know, we are the world and divorced us from each other in terms of our obligations to fellow countrymen above our obligations to people who, you know, live abroad. That was really a cover for figuring out how to make money when we were largely in many ways stagnant. And so you had a class of people who probably blew out the Gini coefficient for the U S without getting to the real issues of the fact that we're a country, that we put people in uniform and you know, send them into harm's way, that we have a higher duty and care in most of our minds to each other than we do to equally deserving people overseas.  

'''Eric:'''  Is that, is that your model for what was going on?  

But I can, well imagine that here's somebody who could honestly say, you know, connecting people is an intrinsic good. I'm just going to do that better than anybody. And the, you know, the wealth will come and this is all good for everybody. Right? And then only at the 11th hour, you know, long after many of us have, have noticed a problem, he begins to play catch up with the problem.  

'''Eric:'''    00:35:07      I actually have some weird backstory on that one. So, I knew Samantha Power at the Kennedy School and she and I sat down, I mean, not, well I don't think. We sat down at a meal and we had friends that connected us. Right. And I asked what you were at, what are you interested in? And she said, well, I'm obsessed with the Red Sox and genocide. Yeah. I said, what?  

'''Eric:'''  And she said, well, you know, the rap on me is I'm all genocide all the time, but nobody cares. And I, you know, I've got book and I can't figure out the answer to the question, why is there not a resolution that we will never, why is it never again not a resolution? And every time I try to get a state to sign up for this or somebody to take this seriously, there's this weird wall that comes down.

'''Eric:'''    00:42:22      Well, let's be, let's put a finer point on it. They are now more likely to let the genie out of the bottle because of their bad behavior or to, you know, huff and puff on an ember that is the pathetic KU Klux Klan of 2019, right? To actually create something that could, it could turn into a roaring fire. I mean, this is a general feature, I often talk about this in terms of magnetic and true North where the angle of declination that separates them is very small at the equator but in Northern Canada it's very large. Right?  

'''Eric:'''  Well, that's right. Yeah. Right. And so it's just the problem is, is that the institution, I mean, look, I've made this point elsewhere so a regular listeners will have heard it, but the concept of the embedded growth obligation, the ego of an institution, which is, it has to do work and grow in order to meet its mandates.

'''Eric:'''  Out pacing, medical.

'''Eric:'''  It’s perfect.  

'''Eric:'''  It is a fit memetic complex.  

'''Eric:'''    00:45:27      Well, and it's colonizing things outside of it. I mean the problem with  journalism, tech, human resources, anything which is a high leverage but often poorly paid for the level of intelligence usually required or the amount of training usually required becomes attractive. So, there's a perverse incentive when you can't pay journalists or scientists or even technologists at appropriate levels. I know people will scream, so you have no idea how much money tech people get paid. And I, I really don't believe it. I think that those jobs are supposed to be even better compensated because of large scale tampering in the sector.  

'''Eric:'''  Sometimes I feel like the two of us. Yeah. That's why I call you Sam. What the hell is going on?  

'''Eric:'''  You know, I mean, I'm not used to disagreeing with you this much.

'''Eric:'''    00:47:13      Sam, I think we've screwed up a lot worse than you're imagining in the past. And that that is the fodder for the twin evils of Trumpism and Wokeism.

'''Eric:'''  If we could do that.  

'''Eric:'''  Okay. In some, some thought experiment? Yeah. I guess what my feeling is, first of all is, is that my head is so filled with malware. I've got, I'm running so many nonsensical programs put there by other people that I don't even know are nonsense. Or I can detect...  

'''Eric:''' well, so we're currently sitting in a room with reflective glass and anechoic tiles that deaden sound. If I echolocate by things that I am absolutely positive would sell newspapers that aren't printed, it's like, okay, you're echolocating and instead of hearing the reflection off of glass, you're hearing a, an absence, which is anechoic tile. And so, if I just look at Google trends, which tells me what people are searching on, if I look at how Google autocompletes, which tells me what they want me to see is what other people are searching on in the search bar. If I look at what stories aren't being run, all of the dead stuff is astounding to me right at the moment.  

The Jeffrey Epstein thing is totally different and you and I both met this guy. For 15 years, and he's the only person I've been saying this with conviction about for 15 years, I had one meeting with him, I've said he's a construct. Somebody hired a person probably named Jeffrey Epstein to play a role, super genius mega billionaire philanthropist. I wasn't buying any of it, I've never bought it. And I've talked to everybody in our sort of mutual network and always used one word because I wanted to make a huge bet that when the time came, I would say he was a construct and that I would be revealed to be correct. And that everybody was asked, what do you mean by a construct? Right. Okay.  

'''Eric:'''  Probably not. I, I recorded an entire Jeffrey Epstein episode, which is just me soloing for an hour, but I haven't released it cause I'm terrified. And I've had one ambiguous dinner where somebody sort of quasi threatened me and I wasn't entirely sure what they were saying. It was a little bit creepy.  

'''Eric:'''  I’m agnostic about that, whether some people stepped away so that he could do the thing that he needed to do, whether there's some vanishing probability that he actually isn't dead. I don't know.

'''Eric:'''  I put that very low odds as well.  

'''Eric:'''  Do you put it at zero odds, Sam?  

Eric It’s a huge, huge difference between those people who insist, when I hear somebody insists that that probability be zero, I take it and that person is smart,  

'''Eric:'''  I wasted no time thinking about it at the moment, but I'm happy to have my Basie and priors tutored.  

'''Eric:'''  Okay.  

''''''Eric:'''        00:52:10      I find that that's an interesting heuristic for somebody.  

'''Eric:''' That's what that was. That was exactly my point that the Kevin Spacey thing I would say is in the realm of Newtonian mechanics. And then the Jeff Epstein thing is like relativistic quantum field theory. Whatever your Newtonian laws are, we're not in Kansas anymore.

'''Eric:''' We should both apologize. Nothing happened.  

Eric Mine spiked like crazy.

'''Eric:'''    00:54:21    From one meeting I've been I've been talking about him for 15 years.

'''Eric:''' You know, so mine was at his house, right. I'm ushered into a waiting room. He's got some super complicated electronical electronic art. I get up, I look at it and I say, wait, is that, is that a camera inside the art? I, the first thing, I'm a genius for finding the cameras. I inside, my next thought is I'm supposed to find the camera inside the art because the cam, the art is supposed to draw my attention and I'm supposed to see that I'm being recorded.  

'''Eric:'''    00:56:05      No, no, this is incredibly important distinction and I don't think that the news media has done a good job of teasing out. It's very attached to the idea of Pedophile Island and Lolita Express. And that lazy, sensationalist journalism is crowding something out, which is that in general from what I understand, so, I met him in 2000, I think 2004, maybe 2003 but before his Florida incarceration and charges, most people that I knew who met him met him with young adult women. And so, my theory is that he was constructed to be the sapiosexual Hugh Hefner.  

'''Eric:'''  And that they stupidly hired probably, and I guess I don't know this Humbert Humbert for the role and that, that dichotomy explains at least a lot of the initial willingness of the science community to play with this person. That, I mean, I'll be honest, I'm not particularly judgmental about consenting adults, even if it's probably ill-advised. You know, to have a 50-year spread between two people. If somebody is 20 and somebody who's 80 ...

'''Eric:'''  Everybody's party to the game.  

'''Eric:'''    00:57:35      That is not a fair defense after the Florida situation, the Florida situation changes that structure.

'''Eric:'''    00:57:51      No, no, no. The prosecution.  

'''Eric:''' So, a lot of people continued to talk to him in part because, and I think this is something that hasn't been teased out, he was supporting an older style of science, which this is again, something that's gonna be super complicated, was much more disagreeable. Now the woke movement has seized on this as well,  that's the cowboy oppressive science of male assholes. But he was supporting a network of people who might not have been supported otherwise to somewhat break out of the mold. And because the U.S. government had stepped away from that work in, in, in large measure, in my opinion, people were so dependent on him that they were eager to look the other way. And there was also the hint, I think that this wasn't really Jeffrey Epstein, that this was really something else funding.

'''Eric:'''    00:59:09      Look, this is, I, I've been on this, this is going to get us into the immigration question, which is that the in the mid-eighties, under Reagan, the science complex particularly the National Science Foundation under Eric Block through the National Academy of Sciences and a subdivision called the Government University Industry Research Round table, GUIRR, are conspired to destroy the bargaining power of American scientists by flooding the market. And what they did is they did an economic analysis with both supply and demand curves to say that the wages, which you can calculate when you have two intersecting curves, we're going to go above six figures for new PhDs.

"Eric"  And well, it's four, it was four countries. It was China, India, Taiwan and Korea. And China went from zero to 60 in like, no, they were sending us nobody, and then I think there were like over 25% of all graduate students. And of course, graduate students aren't students, they're workers. So, there's a cryptic labor economy inside of the universities. And what the university system figured out was, is that in order to get this work done, we'd have to have this, these misclassified students who do the work. important. It is foreign workers. And what we would do is we would take the economic analysis, which they secretly did in 1986 and they'd subtract off the demand curve and they'd just do a supply analysis based on the demography of the baby boom going into the baby bust, which is our generation, Gen X. And that demographic alarm was sounded to get the immigration act of 1990 passed, which has like the H1B is one of its most famous features. So that's, that's a whole story about how the actual workings, I'm the guy who uncovered that and I chased that all the way down to the person who wrote that secret study that was never released, never dated, never authored.  

'''Eric:'''  That thing was the stepping away of the federal government from its con, its commitment through the Vannevar Bush endless frontier agreement to fund the kickass blue-sky research that this country has done better than anyone else.

'''Eric:'''  Well, I mean, look, I've married the maximum number of brilliant women from the developing world who came here to do STEM that the law will allow. So I'm absolutely guilty.  

'''Eric:''' What? Yeah. Well, first of all, that's how country clubs work, right? Right. So, the idea is that when you get country club, when you get into a country club, you don't instantly say, well, I don't understand. It would be immoral for me to close the country club.

'''Eric:'''  And yeah, this is, this is... So what I was told about this,  

'''Eric:'''  Like the bad people, the people.

'''Eric:''' I don't even know how to go into all of the things that are like really funny and wrong about this. Like one of which is, well are you afraid to compete with somebody from India? Well, maybe I'm afraid to compete with a hundred people from India. You know, like the issue is what is your your price point...

'''Eric:'''  No, no.  

'''Eric:'''  Because it's not a uniform, because it's not a uniform product. Sam.  

'''Eric:''' When you talked about software, right, most of software is glorified foreign while loops. Let's not, you know, you, you, you, you invoke a library, you code up a class.

'''Eric:''' Well no, it's just, I'm just saying that most of what it is you're just writing code. It's got a kind of a mystique about it because a lot of people haven't done it and it's too symbolic, whatever.  

'''Eric:'''  It's plumbing and a lot of science is plumbing. Yeah. And so, a lot of the stuff about the best is not very relevant. If you wanted to take the stuff that's really distinguished, you know, like you've got Rama NuGen coming from India, you know you've got you know, Ellis coming from South Africa who, whoever it is, that's really amazing, we have plenty of room for the tiny number of people who are absolutely nonhomogeneous super contributors.  

'''Eric:'''  I'm not saying that, I'm saying a lot of different things. One is that people in the country have rights and they have asymmetric rights to their own labor market. That's a large part of what it means to be a citizen of a country. If I start to talk about your rights that are perhaps your most valuable economic possession, if you really think about the American workers, most valuable economic possession is asymmetric access to the American labor market. If I say, you know, your right is not an asset, but is instead an impediment, it's a barrier. And what we need to do is get rid of the red tape and I'm not going to pay you for it because it's not an asset.

I'm going to take it from you and I'm going to say that that's what the free market is. Well, that has nothing to do with the free market. I wrote a paper called Migration for the Benefit of All that pointed out you're free to securitize people's right and pay for it. And then everybody wins.  

'''Eric:''' That's not what we do.  

'''Eric:''' We're not interested. That would be a Coase, that's called a Coasean solution.  

'''Eric:'''  And the funny part about it, the, the hysterically funny part about it is that no capitalists who claim that they're interested in getting rid of the inefficiency that comes from being forced to use your own labor are interested in the model in which you actually pay people for their securitized rights. Because the real thing they're interested in is not the tiny inefficiency, which is called the Harberger triangle.

'''Eric:'''    01:07:00      There's a giant structure below it called the Morehouse rectangle, which is what is transferred from labor to capital.  

'''Eric:'''  Yeah.  

'''Eric:'''  Yeah. Well, but, but my point...

'''Eric:''' No. But I see it, I see it differently.

'''Eric:''' Sam, I see your comment that well don't we want the best and the brightest where you don't reference wage competition. It sounds more like intellectual competition, right? When you, when you, when you open a border and selectively only in certain fields, it's like opening a window in an airplane and it specifically affects the seat at which it's opened differently than everywhere else in the plane. Right?  

'''Eric:'''  So, the problem I have with this is that it's a large mimetic complex and get it popping back up to the Jeff Epstein issue. The entire university and scientific complex was built on this incredible embedded growth obligation, right?

'''Eric:'''    01:19:23      And the idea is we'd tell you what we're doing, but we'd have to kill you.  

'''Eric:''' The, we, we just didn't know. And I, I got Madoff wrong. I thought he was front running his legitimate business, which turns out it was just a Ponzi scheme.  

'''Eric:'''  But I knew Epstein was very likely to be something totally other than he was. Nassim during this period of time that we were both discussing the nonsense. That was the suppose great moderation, was the other guy who would take as much punishment as the community would throw at him and then would just humiliate him. It's like, Oh, he made one lucky trade in 1987 the guy's an idiot. He's a blowhard. He's a fool. And I couldn't take the pressure from giving this talk that obviously we hadn't banished volatility. And I think around 2005, I was about three years in and Nassim says, you know, you're going to regret getting out of this early.

'''Eric:''' It's very hard for me.

'''Eric:''' I mean, I, I do it and you do it, but you don't get weak-kneed. I get weak-kneed.  

'''Sam:'''        01:21:47      The guy, obviously he's intelligent, is just, he's so, there's no one more enamored of his intelligence than him. Right. And it's just, it's like that level of egocentricity. Again, it has a kind of Trumpian, you know, peacock fan, a quality to it. And in in the cases where it's warranted, it's still extra and it's bullshit and it's annoying when it's unwarranted, it's embarrassing and he has zero sense of where he is on, on that landscape.  

'''Eric:'''  I hear what you're saying. I do have the sense of the number of floorboards that I can hide under when the storm troopers come from me, a very few and far between that I can count on and I can count on his.  

'''Eric:''' So, we don't need to derange on that front.

'''Eric:'''    01:22:34      No, I'm about...

'''Eric:'''  But you know, Sam, I honestly, I find the same thing about you. If I'm in a storm, you're one of the tiny number of phone calls I can place and it's very odd for me that ...

'''Eric:'''  I do. I absolutely do.  

'''Eric:''' Okay.  

'''Eric:''' But getting, getting back to the, to this large... So, with all of these very dangerous and disturbing topics, I start to understand that you believe, and I think it's correct that we often get to hell through a road paved with good intentions.  

'''Eric:'''  I don't disagree with that.  

'''Eric:''' Right.  

'''Eric:'''  It's, it's how, it's how we encode this. That's so interesting to me. Like when we order veal, we just say the word veal. We don't think about what it is that we're causing to occur.  

'''Eric:'''  Exactly. Like very few of us do that. When I think about like how Debbie Wasserman-Schultz...

'''Eric:'''  Yeah.

'''Eric:''' Right.  

'''Sam:'''        01:24:44      You wouldn't want, I mean, well, take the most extreme case. You wouldn't want to be the person who would pay more for the veal if you knew there was more suffering associated with it. Right, you wouldn't want to, we wouldn't want one, we  wouldn't want to be the person who, for whom the suffering is part of the pleasure. Right? That's the, there, that's clearly a place on the moral landscape you don't want to be.