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

Eric:  Well, so what I'm starting to think about what kind of chaos we're in and using the fact that you and I agree on a lot, which I think makes our disagreements more interesting, because I don't like the ground level he said/she said kinds of disagreements. I don't think they're that interesting.  

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

'''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...'  

'''Sam:''' Yeah.  

'''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:''' 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.  

'''Sam:''' But it doesn't have the fact that he wasn't canceled for one of his sins...

'''Eric:''' He was!

'''Sam:''' The fact that we have 40%...  

'''Sam:''' Okay.  

'''Sam:''' So you think that at what point, are we wrong?

'''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.

'''Sam:''' I'm just saying, I get the, 'let's just watch these fuckers burn' stream of pleasure that you can get coursing in your brain. And that, that explains a lot of the Trump phenomenon where it's just, on some level, they don't care that he's the most odious liar we've ever seen. Are they being his, his fan base? They just love to see him wind up the libtards or they love to see...  

'''Sam:''' Well, it's, it's, it's my model for part of it. So, I mean, take someone like, well, let me take Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, right? Well, I don't know Mark I don't know how mercenary he's been from the beginning or, and how out of touch with the possible harms he might cause, he's been.  

'''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:''' But you're getting them to cohere.

'''Sam:''' And, and at the, at the pole South is everywhere.  

'''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.

'''Sam:'''        00:44:34      Yeah. I mean, the way costs have gone up there, you know, way outpacing inflation,

'''Eric:'''  Out pacing, medical.

'''Sam:'''  and, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's amazing. And the fact that you can't discharge your debt in bankruptcy.  

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

'''Sam:''' Yes. A relatively small number of people can do it. It's not, it's not, it doesn't take 7 billion people or 8 billion people. No, but like you, you need to convince the top, you know, 3000 people that one way of talking doesn't work. Right. And to, to, to align fitness and truth more faithfully.  

'''Sam:''' Good. That's why I came here with my alter-ego. Yeah.

'''Eric:''' If we could do that.  

'''Sam:''' Yeah.  

'''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...  

'''Sam:''' you have a sense of what direction to point you're going to find the nonsense. What are you worried about?

'''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.  

'''Sam:''' Do you need to have you clarify that on your podcast before?  

'''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.  

'''Sam:''' Well this is a strand of human complication that you're way more in touch with than I am. I don't deny that it exists. Right. So, like, I think there are real conspiracies and the, and powerful people occasionally, you know, do what, powerful people are occasionally sociopaths and then they, then they do what you would expect or conspired to do what you'd expect. So, I don't have a strong feeling about let's just take the livelihood that Epstein was, was had a facilitated suicide. I think the likelihood that he was murdered is low, but I'll commit suicide. I don't have a strong

'''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.

'''Sam:''' I put that at very low.  

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

'''Sam:''' But you put no, I'm a fan of the …

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

'''Sam:''' Well I wouldn't, I know enough about probability to put almost nothing and zero.

'''Sam:''' But effectively, effectively zero. I mean zero in the sense that we don't have time to worry about it.

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

'''Sam:''' Right.  

'''Eric:''' Okay.  

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

'''Sam:''' It's, it's usually, I think it's usually true, right? So, like it works much of the time and then it, it fails, but it fails in a case where you get more information and then you update your view.

'''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.

'''Sam:''' But I had no, you put me in the same room with him. So, I should probably clarify that. So, I had, I've found myself, but  

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

'''Sam:'''  I found myself at a lunch with him at the TED conference and had no insight into him or what he was up to apart from the fact that he, you know, my sort of creep detector went off,

Eric Mine spiked like crazy.

'''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:''' 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" 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:''' 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.  

'''Sam:''' You got your wife and then you want to close the border?

'''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,  

'''Sam:''' But I'm just not, I'm not saying that it's not without cost to somebody. It's definitely costing somebody something. Right?  

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

'''Sam:''' No, no, no. Not the bad people, but just, it's, it's like  

'''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...

'''Sam:''' You are though, on this podcast, you're competing with people from India. I mean you're competing with, you know, there are 800,000 podcasts.  

'''Eric:''' No, no.  

'''Sam:''' You're, you're competing with, with 799,999...  

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

'''Sam:''' No, but you still...  

'''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.

'''Sam:''' You can outsource it. All right.

'''Sam:''' But it's plumbing.   

'''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.  

'''Sam:''' So, you're just saying you want to set the bar higher.  

'''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.

'''Sam:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' That's not what we do.  

'''Sam:''' Okay, so, but that's, that's something we could do though. We could...

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

'''Eric:''' Yeah.  

'''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 Because of two things,  its exhausted ability and exclude ability.  

Sam  Right.  

Eric  The idea is that if I buy a vinyl record, 1) my use of it will eventually wear down the grooves.  

Sam Exactly.  

Eric As it to do in the old days and 2) my having the record means that you don't have that car  

Sam I have to borrow it.  

Eric and that the, the per the unit costs is not zero.  

Sam  I can't copy your record for free. Yeah.  

Eric That is this issue about private goods and services became public goods and services and even the diehard economists who are free market have to recognize that if something is inexhaustible and an excludable price does not equal value and therefore it cannot command its value.

Sam  But I'm saying there's a non-nefarious account of what happened there. Where your iTunes, right, your Apple, you open iTunes for the good of all right? But you, you obviously want to make a profit, right? This is a fantastic business. But what, when, if you're the musician who now who's now because catalog is now worth, you know, one 10th of what it used to be worth and now you're, you have this sort of life change foisted on you, where now the only way for you to make ends meet is to tour. But you're 70 years old and you, you know, you, you felt your touring was behind you, right? All of this looks awful. But again, nobody was thinking about that guy when they, when these changes came about.

Eric  Bull shit.  

Sam Well, it's easy to see that most people weren't thinking, well, no one, no one had bad intentions toward that.  

Eric Remember, information just wants to be free and free like beer and all this nonsense. I thought that stuff was just like moronic at the time. Okay. The same thing with NAFTA, right? The claim...  

Sam But again, so, so what you had in your sites was not, you can't, I don't think you're, you're, you're the wrong theory of mind if you think everyone was aware of what you were aware of and just had the say, the ethical switch flipped in the other direction.

Eric This is one of the reasons why you and I split on Nassim Taleb. I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Nassim during the total nonsense called the great moderation in our financial structure right before 2008, right.  

Sam And the only reason why I split on Nassim is that he just wakes up one morning and you know, off his meds and attacks me for reasons I can never fathom. So, it's like, it's totally personal. Like, or it's intended to be personal. It's not that I take it personally. I mean, I actually,  

Eric  I don't even think it's already personal. He can correct me on that.

Sam  But it's apropos of nothing. Like I've been, you know, I've been sleeping when he was sleeping and then I turn on Twitter and I see that he's attacked me by name for some reason...

Eric When my phone lights up and it says Nassim.

Sam  There's no intellectual content.

'''Eric''' Yeah. And you don't want to be associated with, right. So, if that's at all unsavory, then they're there many gradations of better than that.  

Eric  Right. So, it's back to my issue about orcas are either the best or worst species?  

Sam Yeah. No but I didn't mean to derail you there, but it matters. Like we need to unpack the mimetic complex and get at what's inside. And it matters if we, if we fail to, if there's a lot inside and we were, we're unaware of it.  

Eric Sure.  

Sam That matters.

Eric  Okay.  

Sam How often are we just saying veal, but  

Eric  

For example, I remember when Debbie Wasserman Schultz was being interviewed about superdelegates and she said they're not super delegates. They're unpledged delegates and delegates. And why do we have to have them? And I think she said something to the effect, and if I'm getting this wrong, I

'''Eric:'''    01:26:04      apologize. Something like, well, you wouldn't want the, the people who aren't regular party workers, you know, just being able to take over the party, something like this. I was thinking like, Oh, that's what we all think it is, that it's a primary and that the people who are registered Democrats should figure out who that they should support as a candidate. And her point was, well, we have to have a thumb on the scale, otherwise democracy might happen.  

Same Right? Yeah.  

Eric  And like that thing is how we encode the badness. We encode it by creating some different way of talking about it.

Sam How we encode it or we fail to encode it, how it becomes operable or how...

Eric Well, nobody's a bad person in their own mind most of the time.  

Sam Yeah. Most.  

Eric So, when I do bad things, I encode it differently. So, we were just in a, in a situation where we were waiting in a very long line of cars for an off ramp and our car, you know, and our car sort of zoomed ahead and then asked somebody's you know understanding that we would cut in right towards the exit.

Sam Yeah. But so, don't you think living a good life is in large measure a matter of kind of squeezing the, the delta between those two states of mind?  

Eric  I think you think that that's true.

Sam That's why it was a leading question.  

Eric  I know, I know, but I think that it's actually much more tricky.  

Sam So, let's take the antithesis. What if I told you that I thought it was a matter of getting broadening that gulf, right? So, to be more extremely at odds with oneself, depending on what side of the table you're on.

Sam  I don't think you're giving me, you're giving Nassim Taleb too much credit and you're not giving me enough.  

Eric Oh, is that right?  

Sam So, so I am  

Eric I see you as being pretty consistent in a lot of ways.  

Sam Yeah. What I aspire to be is to, to cut in line the right amount.  

Eric Okay.  

Eric Well, so that's very odd. I'm pretty close to that.  

Sam Yeah. I mean I, so I don't have too many illusions about what it is to do it and what and but what it is when somebody else does it. So, I don't, I'm not as, and when I catch, when I occasionally catch myself in that, that mismatch between you know, who I'm capable of being in one moment and how judgmental I am of somebody else in that same mode.  

Sam But yeah. But to be, to truly want to minimize it, you have to be in touch with it.

'''Sam''' So, we run those, that's two pieces of software you're running at the same time.  

'''Eric''' Well, it's, I think it's more like I don't see any prospect for ridding myself of it. And other people, so, I caught someone that I have to get rid of it. You know, it's like it's, it's a, it's an imagined state that they could, they could prove more or less that you can't live without it.  

'''Sam''' We, we, because you're not a unitary thing, right?  

'''Eric''' You aren't a unitary thing. Right. And most of us, even though we know that we still treat ourselves as unitary things, which is bizarre.

Sam Yeah.

Eric well you're in the mindfulness...

Sam I work hard not to do that,  

Eric yeah, but I don't have an app, but I don't do, do these practices. But I'm still very conscious of that fact that I'm not, I'm not unitary. Yeah.  

Sam No, I mean that if you follow that a little bit further, that becomes very interesting because you're not, but that doesn't mean you, there's not a, there's no norm you wanted to aspire to follow.

Eric But there is some way in which what you're talking about is that one of your parliaments of selves is that your meta-self, which you're probably getting as close to identifying with unitarity as anything else.  

Sam Well, it's just, there is, the more you..

Eric The thing that supervises the sub-routines, you would probably call Sam Harris.  

Sam Well, I would, it's, it's more diaphanous and that may ultimately, it's, there's consciousness. I mean, the only thing that can supervise anything is, or be aware of anything or experience anything is what I'm calling consciousness.

Eric It builds the point.

 

 

 

Sam Not noticing, thought as thought, being identified with every intention that that surfaces in the mind is really deeply analogous to be, to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing you're dreaming.

Eric Well, it's interesting because sometimes I can't actually use the information. So, for example, when you went into the, don't we want the best and brightest thing, right? I thought, oh my God, Sam is going to drag me there. And that way he's to believe, well, no, because, because there is no thing called xenophillic restrictionism, which is what most of us are. Certainly, I am in, in my belief structure. And the idea that every single news organ is ready to call any restriction, a xenophobe. I'm thinking, oh my God, Sam is dragging me to this place. He doesn't even know it. And I'm starting to get angry and agitated and excited. And there was nothing I could do to actually, I couldn't find any control knob.  

Sam But so, it did come back to, to earth where you know, something more concrete than pure consciousness.

Eric It's no longer adaptive.  

Sam  So, it's like how much time am I getting? So now, like in my use of social media, like I'll get on Twitter, I'll see something outrageous, I'll get triggered by it, but I mean, I'll get off 30 seconds later and it's over. Right? Whereas if I, if I were to do the thing that entangled me, you know, it could, you know, it could take up much more of my life.

Sam Right. I mean, I, there's the juxtaposition there may be somewhat accidental, but the, the, the vividness, like it, there was a spell that's been broken for me with respect to social media. Like I, I, I had, and I actually, I had paid lip service to this and just didn't know that it was just lip service, but I had been talking about Twitter and social media generally as a psychological experiment that we were running ours on ourselves to which no one had consented. Right? We just enrolled half of humanity in this thing and we're just, you know, let's see what happens. And it's, it's clearly a having effects that are at best non-optimal right? You know, at worst, you know, catastrophic.

Eric You saw that get diffused?

Sam Yeah, that talk about no good deed go unpunished. I did my best to launch that podcast.  

Eric There's something wrong with that account because there's many ways in which it seems quite reasonable.  

Sam  Yeah. And then it degraded into mental illness.  

Eric There's a personal, there's a personal nastiness about it that just doesn't let up. Sam  

  Yeah.  

Eric And a lack of charity. And what I find is that there are certain things I can do to slow down that kind of a negative experience. And then there are certain die-hard actors, some of whom are quite polite and charming and funny who just will not, like their thing is they will ride this to the most negative place if they get there. And that sub-community I've been talking about in terms of we have diversity and inclusion, which I'm willing to say is a good thing.

Sam Ah no,

Eric  He's like a progressive, he's kind of like a punk Arlo Guthrie. Woody Guthrie rather. Yeah. And like he turns out he wrote a book and he's talking about Eric Weinstein an investment banker who is a free speech, you know, champion, won't meet with, I don't know, some whole, he's got a whole story in his mind.  

Sam  And he so he took a shot at you and in his book?  

Eric  He went on Sam Cedar's program.  

Sam  Oh, well there's a venue that is not going to select for honest opinions.  

Eric I spoke to Sam. Look, there's a problem with the Saul Alinsky thing where Saul, you know, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, the focus on ridicule.

Sam Doing that with abandon.

Eric Well, it's willing to do two separate things. Sam is quite willing like there's this whole thing, like, will you talk to Sam Cedar, will you debate Sam Cedar?  

'''Eric:'''        01:40:54      My feeling is I would debate part of Sam Cedar, the part that just is focused on the ideas, but the part that is kind of like nasty and ridiculing and doing the Alinsky thing. I don't know what to do with it. I'm not interested. I've spoken to Sam Cedar on the phone is perfectly reasonable. Made sense to me. We disagreed on positions, but...

Sam  Well, the line that gets crossed for me always with these guys, and again it's, it's disproportionately on the left, is the line of conscious dishonesty, I mean, your brother's aphorism, bad faith changes everything.  

Bad faith changes everything.  

Sam And these guys are in bad faith. They know they're lying about, in my case, my views, my actual beliefs and  

Eric Not all of them.   

Sam  Don't they? There's just too much information.  

Eric  Well, David Pakman...  

Sam  No, David Pacman's fine. I just did his podcast. Yeah, I know.

Sam  Of me?

Eric You, me, other people,

Sam  I haven't, whatever. I haven't, I have never seen him  

Eric He's pretty good

Sam  I've never seen him misrepresent my views and I think, I mean I, again, I don't know him, I just did his podcast once, but he seems like he seems like somebody who, if I said, listen, you've got me wrong here, that would matter. And he would, he would make an effort to get me right.  

Eric And that's the thing, which is the problem that we have increasingly is that the tactics that are being used in what are called progressive circles have been confused with the content. So that is, the objections to the vehicle, which might be Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, is conflated with...

Sam  It is a totally unethical program for smearing people dishonestly.

Sam  No it's, no it's an ends justify the means.  

Eric  That's the big problem on the left.  

Sam  Yeah. So, but that ethic is, is flawed, right? So, like, so for instance, I mean like with me and Trump, like there's nobody who...  

Eric  You don't like the guy.

Sam  ...who denigrates Trump as avidly as I do, but I am super careful to be honest. Right? So, like I, it's not that you can't even, you can smear him with his fair.