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

'''Sam:'''        00:04:09      Like this is an example, so you take the New York Times and you and I whinge about The New York Times a fair amount, uh...

'''Sam''‘ But something has changed. So, it's this - is this worse than the '80s?  

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

   

'''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.  

'''Sam:'''        00:08:08      I don't know if this, The Times is maybe an exception here, but I think generally what's happening in journalism, there's just been a clearing out of real journalists, right? I mean, the business has gotten so bad and again, The Times and the Post and The Atlantic, there's a few outliers here that are doing well in the age of Trump at least, you know, sort of, well.  

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'''Sam:'''        00:12:50      Well, I would argue that, you know, I'm fairly forgiving on that point because I feel that Trump has made the hiding of one's so-called bias irresponsible, essentially, it's like you, you can't, you can't pretend that this is a normal president doing normal things and you're going to be a normal journalist without an opinion.  

'''Sam:'''        00:13:49      Well it's certainly been creeping up on us in the life sciences. It's been true of the social sciences for a very long time.

'''Sam:'''        00:14:22        Oh, I think it's just different problems. I don't know which is more consequential. I think the I think the failure to have a fact-based discussion and the incentives to avoid one, I think that's just the scariest thing we have going apart from the true Monsters of Pandemic and Nuclear War and things like that.  

'''Sam:'''        00:15:27      Well I think if you wait long enough, you see the failures of hypocrisy, right?  You see people try to enshrine a new set of rules that prove unworkable in some of the context, you know, or, or they, they just can't live up to them because of... it's impossible. I mean, we're now noticing, and it's been widely observed that more or less, if you wait around long enough, everyone's going to get canceled. You know, it's like the repurposing of the Warhol quote, you know, we'll all be canceled for 15 minutes at some point.  

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

'''Sam:'''        00:17:28      Yeah except he's the doctor who doesn't know which bone he has in hand and, and a isn't actually intending to heal you.  

So, it's the happy accident of the doctor who happens, the mad man who happens to have a hold of the right femur and a is breaking it for the wrong reasons, but to good effect.

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

   

'''Sam:'''    00:18:45      Do you think my model of his mind is wrong or my model of the consequences of, of him being in office is wrong?  

The thing that crept into our system with Reagan and Bush giving way to the Clintons back to Bush, and then bizarrely I thought Obama was going to be a break from this, that thing induces a passion in some of us to get rid of it. We hate it and I don't know that you carry that passion and so I think it's harder for you to understand it and I carry it not from a right-wing perspective. I carry it from a progressive to center-left position.

'''Sam:'''        00:27:51      Well, and some of this comes back to the hypocrisy point I was making before. So, I, I have that Trumpian module in my brain that feels just the pure schadenfreude of seeing Justin Trudeau get wholly cloistered on his own petard, right? So, here's this sanctimonious enforcer of woke culture just pandering to the left, it's clearly unsustainable, it's clearly dishonest, it's, and unworkable. And, you know, offline we spoke about just that moment where he's, he's admonishing this, this elementary school-age girl when she says the word mankind, which is a, you know it's great to hear a sixth grader use a phrase, mankind. But he says: "No, we say people kind". Maybe they say people kind up in Canada, I haven't heard that. But, you know, even just saying humankind there and, and, and enforcing that, that taboo there was just, that's the elitism the goofy elitism that, that...  

'''Sam:'''        00:30:37      But for the most part that the left was the political party that, that, I mean everyone was part of that same extractive economy, but the left at least paid lip service to the virtue of spreading the wealth around.

'''Sam:'''        00:31:30      Yeah, there's something to that. But I think there's also all too common phenomenon of people motivated by actually good intentions, even incredibly noble intentions, causing a lot of chaos that they didn't intend, right? So, let me take...  

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:'''    00:35:54      It's the clearest thing in the world that we should never let genocide ever happen again. Right? And she was convinced and nobody's going to take her seriously. This was going to go nowhere. And then progressively, somehow this thing started to catch fire and I, for a period of time I was emailing her like, do you believe it now? Do you believe it now that this, cause I, I knew this thing was going to get huge?  

'''Sam:'''        00:39:33      Yeah. Well I think people are, you're not going to get me to disagree there that people are impressively split or at least can be. And I think a coherence generally speaking or at least striving for it is good. And I think, living an examined life in part as it is, is struggling with those discoveries of, of incoherence and figuring out how to get this congress of mine, as you call yourself, to actually cohere.

'''Sam:'''        00:40:01      Yeah. No. So, but so, but when you're talking about the normal person who, I think it is a frequent phenomenon , to have, you know, normal, the normal range of good intentions to not be a sociopath, to want to help the world to be in philanthropy, for instance, right. To, to, to, to actually to be this, I mean, you're already, if you're devoting your life, if you are a, you know, a smart person who, you know, got a good degree, who could work more or less anywhere, but you decide to work for, for a charity, right? You're already an outlier. You're already somebody who said no to Wall Street or no to Hollywood or no to something, and now you're working for the, you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center or something like, you want to just stop racism, right? So, you're already one of the good guys.  

'''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:'''    00:43:27      That is the thing that has metastasized throughout our institutional structure. And so, it's not the Southern Poverty Law Center. I mean, that's particularly egregious, but the entire university system, every single measure you can take on that thing, looks like an intergenerational wealth transfer right down to the nondischargeability of student debt and bankruptcy. Well, the loading up of every university by administrators and the monopolization at the moment, almost 100% of our leading institutions are run by a baby boomer whereas the average age, in a different era of a university president, we could have most of them under gen X control and some of them under millennial control, there were university presidents in their thirties who had a huge impact. I mean, that is a system which has gone totally metastatic.

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

'''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.  

'''Sam:'''        00:46:33      But we have a hand in this so we can tune the landscape, right?  

'''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.

'''Sam:'''        00:47:26      But just, just grant me the, the possible sea change effect of the 3000 people, the right 3000 people, fundamentally getting their head straight on, on these issues or any issue, right. Whatever it is. So, you're talking about basically all of Hollywood, all of journalism and all of the science that's public facing.  

Like I know for example that people are fascinated by the Jeffrey Epstein story. And in general, like you know, we just had, so normally I don't love talking about current events because it dates the program, but we just had a Kevin Spacey's accuser reported as dying. I don't think that that is likely to be part of some super evil plot to just so people can calibrate. It's not that everything that could make sense because there's an incentive, I chalk up to a conspiracy.  

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 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 Mine spiked like crazy.

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

I'm called out to a room in back with a huge long, it's sort of exaggerated dining table with a giant American flag as its tablecloth, so that any food or drink that is served on it may spill onto an American flag. And I'm just in high alert, like, fuck you. Who, who, who are you?  

'''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.  

'''Sam:'''        00:57:15      There's just, it's a completely different thing is it's very easy to see that if you've seen this guy be sort of the womanizing schmuck, right within the bounds of, you know, total legality and he's surrounded by 20 year olds and you know, he's got a 40 year...  

'''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.  

'''Sam:'''        00:58:48      Hmm. Well, I dunno about that. I mean, I, I think the, the relative penury of science is a corrupting variable and the fact that we, we underfund science and that it matters that when the rich guy comes into the room, right to, to scientists because they're so starved for money, that's just, that's just corrupting.

'''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.  

'''Sam:'''        01:01:27      But how is that distinguishable from what on his face seems to me to be a rational policy, which is why not try to attract the world's best and brightest and incentivize them to start their businesses here, settle here, you know what, once you've gotten your PhD at Harvard, you know, you, you've got a green card and you know, here's your, here's the Silicon Valley's over there. You know what I mean? So why when ...

'''Sam:'''        01:02:05      No, but no, but no, my, my point is that strikes me as a good policy, even though that would create more competition for, you know, so-called Americans, right? Because we're, we're now open for, for the world's business. But if you actually wanted to maximize, you know, creativity and, and industry here, you would want to import Indians and Chinese and Taiwanese and Koreans.  

'''Eric:'''        01:03:01      I mean, so it's a very weird thing for me that people who are very steeped in what you were just talking about, which is this interesting mimetic complex that got pushed out don't tend to think critically about it. Of course, we want the best people in the world to come to the U S selfishly.  

'''Sam:'''  I mean, you know, everyone doesn't, I mean, the person who has to compete with the best coming from India and Taiwan and China. Yeah. That person, let's say in, in a, you know, software engineering, that person has found, now suddenly on a much more competitive playing field.  

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

'''Eric:'''    01:08:01      That is the thing that caused the system to have to rescue itself with immigration. So, it's really not about immigration or brown people or I don't want to compete against the best and the prizes. It, the issue was we didn't have enough people to feed into a pyramid system. And what you could do is you could, you could reference a poverty differential between Asia, which was training people acceptably well in technical subjects, but had it at a lower level, now that's changed some to fill in the bottom of the pyramid. And so that's really what it was. It was an economic X point that has nothing to do with the best and the brightest or the color of one's skin. It was just a way of saving a pyramid scheme.

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

'''Eric:'''    01:20:15      You should see it through. And it always stuck with me that I didn't quite have the courage or the strength or the guts or the disagreability to continue, at least to hold the intellectual position. I couldn't time when this thing was going to blow, but it was, you know, I wrote this thing on mortgage backed securities with Adil, Abdullah Ali in 2001. This was nonsense. And it was a world in which almost no one was willing to call it out. And so, the singularity in my, in my world about Nassim has to do with he, he's willing to be one person against billions. He will, he will literally just stand up against any crowd.  

'''Sam:'''        01:20:58    Okay, well, so that's, that's often a bug. And you found the one case perhaps where it was a feature, but it's a, I mean, first of all, we're all like that to some degree. I mean, we were, we're all standing up, right?  

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

'''Sam:'''        01:43:29      First of all, cause he's gonna do an entire show. We know you're [inaudible] but we'll take these quotations. No, but he, he, he has Pechman's ability to reason. I mean, I got this, the banality of evil, right? Like there's not that many evil people or there's just a lot of people who are functioning in some normal mode was with, with normal incentives and they become assholes because they're not heroes. Right. But so like it takes some work not to be an asshole when you are incentivized to be one and, and we're all vulnerable to this, but there's some people who have just cashed in that nonsense on the left makes me crazy because in part it just feels like all of my ideals turned into some piece of crap. That's where of the left, not only the left man. I came from a farther left part than I didn't even, I don't even know where you started, but yeah.