Editing 11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends

'''Sam Harris:''' Well, I, so clearly there is room for innovation on all these fronts and we should be eager to do it. And we should be certainly eager to find Ponzi schemes that we didn't know were Ponzi schemes. Right? Like I think it's, we again, this touches where we started when we were talking about Samantha Power and other and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I think there are systems we set up with the best of intentions and you know, projects and, you know, mimetic complexes we launch, you know, upon the world with the best of intentions, and we don't see the way incentives will align or the knock-on effects, or the externalities of doing those things. And, I mean it's just, the world is more complicated than we realized.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And that's what was—so that's like the thing that scares me a little bit. Remember when I said that I have malware in my head? My belief is, is that a lot of the beautiful things that you were thinking about, about being open to the world, training the best and the brightest, keeping some of them for ourselves, distributing some of them back home to grow the pie for everyone, et cetera, et cetera. That's a mimetic complex that I associate with malware. It's not that there aren't aspects of it which move me.

'''Sam Harris:''' Well but I think it's close to the right program. So for instance, like if you say—yeah, it's—the fact that I'm not thinking when I say that about the—I forget how you put it, but the difference between the local case and the imported case, right? You know, by analogy, you know, opening the window on the airplane. Or just the fact that you know that you've got people here who are paying taxes to help build out local infrastructure that then some titan of industry is going to leverage and globalize. Right? And you know that money is not coming back to the people who are paying taxes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right, so these games—the totality of these games is what got us very angry at the Clinton Era people.  

'''Sam Harris:''' Yeah.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This is the Brad Delong's and Paul Krugman’s and Jagdish Bhagwati's and Bill Clinton's of the world. All of these people pushed out this idea, and we didn't know how to oppose it. But what they were doing was allowing a slice of our country to continue to grow its slices of the pie.

''01:11:09''

'''Sam Harris:''' But again, it's just easy to find non nefarious, not malignantly selfish understanding of what happened. I'll give you another example, which I think is—you're totally familiar with but will seem less sinister or at least it seems so to me. So, you take what happened to the music industry, right? So, it's like we have a breakthrough in technology. We go from vinyl, to CDs and then, those, you know, we suffer those jewel cases for about a decade and then we get PMP3s which opened the door to piracy of a sort which no one has anticipated. And then we managed to close down the piracy. We have you know, the iTunes store and people are but because of this, this explosion of piracy and now the prospect of just, you know, now it's all bits, it's not atoms anymore, we have a, just a fundamental devaluation of the product, right? Like, the value of the music has basically gone to zero, right, because my using a copy of it is not taking it from you.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, because of two things: its exhaustability and excludability.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' As it to do in the old days, and 2) my having the record means that you don't have that copy.  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  And that the unit cost is not zero.  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  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 inexcludable, price does not equal value and therefore it cannot command its value. So, that was clear to many of us just as...

'''Sam Harris:'''  But I'm saying there's a non-nefarious account of what happened there, where you're iTunes, right, you're Apple, you open iTunes for the good of all right? But you obviously want to make a profit, right? This is a fantastic business. But if you're the musician whose catalog is now worth, you know, one tenth 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 know, 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.

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

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  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 Harris:''' But again, so, so what you had in your sites was not, you can't, I don't think 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 Weinstein:''' No, no, no. Ok. The class, the economic class teaches public goods in every Econ 101 textbook.

 

 

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  They also teach trade. They have two different names for what happens to improve a society, in terms of how it's measured. One called Pareto improvement, which is that everybody in the society is as good or better off. And the other one called Kaldor-Hicks, which is, some people get hurt, some people get helped, but were you to tax the winners to pay the losers, everyone could be Pareto improved. Okay. When you ask these people in real time, "Why are you talking about a Kaldor-Hicks improvement in Pareto terms?" So, this is the technical, esoteric conversation. "Why is your exoteric description of this at odds with your esoteric?", alright? This is pure Straussian cryptic bullshit. They say, "Well, we can't really say that and we hope that somebody—it's not our job". It was this wall of total nonsense. And it wasn't that this wasn't being said in real time. But the number of people...

'''Sam Harris:''' Well, I'm sure you can find the people at the conference who were, I mean it's, you know, they have one way of speaking to the profession, and one way of speaking on the op-ed pages in New York Times.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' 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 Harris:'''  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 Weinstein:'''  I don't even think it's intended to be personal. He can correct me on that. Look—

'''Eric Weinstein:''' When it says Nassim Nicholas Taleb—he's been my friend for a long time. I literally shake—like, I have to hit, right, "answer"?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Look, Nassim is not an inside cat. He just isn't. I see the things he does and I get, I get a lump in my throat and I think, "Am I going to have to defend this?" I know, I know what he does, but I think people don't understand him, so at least let me offer up an apology for Nassim Taleb, which he may rip my head off for saying. Nassim is constructed around things that are much larger than what other people are considering, and I don't, I'm not saying that he does everything well. I obviously have a totally different tack than he does, so I'm very uncomfortable with his methods, but let's at least say what they are and steelman to the extent possible. Other people say "You, Joe, are misusing statistics". Nassim would say "There's a problem with statistics."

 

'''Sam Harris:''' Yeah.  

 

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And it's constructed to be misused, and it's misused all the time in the same way, and if you do anything that you were normally taught to do in statistics class, if you have a PhD in statistics, you're part of the problem, and I'm going to hold you personally responsible.  

 

 

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Now, this is very disconcerting to people.  

'''Sam Harris:''' Yeah. And so, I mean, I don't think we should spend a lot of time on this, but there are areas where I am not qualified to fact check him. But the areas where I am, where his opinions are just as strident, it's just a deluge of bullshit coming from him. So, like he, you know, the stuff he has said about religion and science is not even, I mean, the truth is, it's not ''even'' wrong. It's like it's incoherent. It's not like he's got a counterpoint that I still think is wrong, but, you know, it has to be argued against. It's just this vomitus.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Look, I've gotten there too. I can't stand the style, cause it just hurts me. Like I just, I, I'm very uncomfortable by it. However, there are plenty of times when I thought he was talking nonsense that, like, at first it sounds like he's making a sensible objection. Then I'm just like convinced this as he's going off the rails, and then I push further and it turns out there's even more of a point. So I have learned to be very cautious around him, not because he's the person you want around for most of the time, but when we were in the middle of the Great Moderation and I, I punked out, cause I was, I was with him and I was giving talks about Epstein and Madoff—it was at the two mysterious functions in New York, and I used to put slides up about black arts capital. It was sort of a play on like Blackstone or BlackRock.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And the idea is "We'd tell you what we're doing, but we'd have to kill you."

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

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  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 supposed Great Moderation, was the other guy who would take as much punishment as the community would throw at him. And they 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. 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 disagreeability 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 [http://eric-weinstein.net/Papers/Nuisance_of_Translucence.pdf this thing on mortgage backed securities with Adil Abdulali 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 world about Nassim has to do with he's willing to be one person against billions. He will literally just stand up against any crowd.  

'''Sam Harris:''' 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're all standing up against a lot, right?  

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

'''Sam Harris:''' Yeah, occasionally. But it's, there is a kind, I mean, again, I'm—not to psychoanalyze him, but there's this, there's a sort of Trumpian-level personality problem layered on top of his intellect where, I'm not disputing the guy is smart, there's no question, he's smart, but there's just, there's so much personality to get through and wrangle with, to interact with whatever, whatever smarts are showing up, depending on the topic. And again, with some topics, you know, I haven't found the smarts, but I'm not disputing that. 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, quality to it. And 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 Weinstein:'''  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, are very few and far between that I can count on, and I can count on his.  

'''Sam Harris:''' You're putting a high price on personality, I mean, I get—

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, I'm about—

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  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 Weinstein:''' Yeah, yeah. Okay.  

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

'''Sam Harris:''' And the, and the converse is also true. You can have, you can have good effects of, of bad intentions and that's, and you shouldn't credit the good effects too highly there, you know, because like the, I think intentions matter for the most part. I mean, intentions are the operating system. So, we could like, if you are, if you're iterating on your intentions, if you're error correcting—

'''Sam Harris:'''  —and hewing back to the outcomes you actually want, right, that is, those are the people we can collaborate with that, you know, when they're ethical. The people who are right by accident, are producing good things by accident are—

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  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.  

'''Sam Harris:''' I want the three-minute video before I eat the veal.  

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

'''Sam Harris:''' But that's why I don't order veal, right. That's a difference. At a certain point, too much information has a consequence, right? Like I'm not comfortable with veal or foie gras, right.

'''Sam Harris:''' So, it's like if, and it would matter, it should if you said, well, here's veal, but this is pain-free veal, right.  

'''Sam Harris:''' This is veal that was, you know, synthesized in a lab. No animals involved. The problem goes away. So that's—the fact that there is, you'd want there to be a difference there. 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 to be the person for whom the suffering is part of the pleasure, right? That's clearly a place on the moral landscape you don't want to be.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah.  

'''Sam Harris:''' And you don't want to be associated with, right. So, if that's at all unsavory, then there are many gradations of better than that.  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  Right. So, this gets back to my issue about orcas are either the best or worst species...

'''Sam Harris:''' 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 fail to, if there's a lot inside and we're unaware of it.  

'''Sam Harris:''' How often are we just saying veal, without realizing...  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But, for example, I remember when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was being interviewed about superdelegates and she said "They're not superdelegates, they're unpledged 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 apologize—something like, "Well, you wouldn't want the people who aren't regular party workers, you know, just being able to take over the party", or 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."

'''Sam Harris:'''  Right. Yeah.  

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

'''Sam Harris:'''  How we encode it? Or we fail to encode it? How it becomes operable? Or how...

'''Sam Harris:'''  Yeah. Most—

'''Eric Weinstein:'''    So, when I do bad things, I encode it differently. So, we were just 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.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' See, I think you would have been less likely to cut in line, but if you did cut in line, I wonder if you'd be less likely to notice it and talk about it the way I do. So, I think that your morality and my morality differ slightly.  

'''Sam Harris:'''  So, so I am—

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

'''Sam Harris:''' And to be appropriately nonjudgmental when I see someone else cut in line.

'''Sam Harris:'''  Yeah. I mean I, so I don't have too many illusions about what it is to do it, and 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 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.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Noticing your own sort of issues makes you a better person if you can port them more generally. So, in other words, if you say, look, I recognize that, you know, I'm not the best around food or something, but yeah, I am very conscious in some other area like being timely. Well, if you can recognize somebody else's failings as akin to your own in a different area and port that, that's a way in which, like, being in touch with your own hypocrisy I think makes you a better person. And I worry about people who are trying to rid themselves of their hypocrisy rather than first noticing it and then sort of minimizing it so that it is less garish.

'''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 some, I have to get rid of it. You know, it's like it's an imagined state that they could—I could prove more or less that you can't live without it.  

'''Sam'''  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.

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  Well you're in the mindfulness space...

'''Sam Harris:'''  I work hard not to do that—

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

'''Sam Harris:''' Yeah. 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.

'''Sam Harris:''' Right. Like you can be, there are faces of your mind, you can prefer to others, and you can, and there's also something that happens when you're, when you cease to be taken in by your different selves and all these different modes, right. To the normal degree. Then you can actually, then there's a kind of freedom to navigate to a kind of a happier, conversation.

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

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

'''Sam Harris:'''  Well, I would, it's more diaphanous and, I mean, ultimately, it's just 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.

'''Sam Harris:''' Now, that's not—when you really pay attention to what that's like, it doesn't actually answer to the, to the name "I" or "me". I mean, it really is just, it's just this open space in which everything's appearing, including thoughts and intentions and desires and emotions. And there, it really is a cacophony, but the cacophony changes the more you fall back to this position of just witnessing the show, right. And so, you know, it's like you're—I guess, one analogy that's actually fairly apropos is the difference between dreaming and lucid dreaming, right? The more you lucid dream, the more you actually can kinda change your dreams. I mean, that's what it is.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' To a point.  

'''Sam Harris:''' Yeah. But you're still, you know, there's a consequence to being lucid and in your—and being perpetually lost in thought being perpetually, being identified...

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But not noticing—

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

'''Sam Harris:''' Right, you're in a situation you're not recognizing.  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  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 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 Harris:''' But so, it did come back to, to earth where you know, something more concrete than pure consciousness.