Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. So, in a societal sense, is research into, say, racial IQ differences worth it?

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. So, in a societal sense, is research into, say, racial IQ differences worth it? — RogueAI

Go back hundred years or more and you would find firm believers in eugenics etc. in the academic scene in many universities with really bad societal ideas. Now there aren't anymore those kind of "scientific racists" as in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, so I think is more of a topic of PC scaremongering and something dear to the few real racists among us.

And coming to the topic of the thread, I remember Sam Harris saying that the racial IQ discourse is simply dumb.

My (anecdotal) experience with racists is they'll seize on anything to justify their racism because even they know, deep down, it's really stupid to be racist.

That sounds like most people, not just racists. Anything other than admitting they are wrong or that they dont know, ad hoc rationalisations etc etc, all very human.

True.

It's weird. Since posting my opinion of Harris a week ago, my Youtube feed is suddenly full of Sam Harris clips. Maybe it's a coincidence. A Harris clip showed up by chance and since this thread was on my mind, I clicked on it. And whatever you click on in Youtube, you get a lot more like it right afterward. That's how their algorithm is coded. Or maybe deep in the bowels of Google's servers, my comments here are linked to other aspects of my online identity, and they factor that into my Youtube suggestions. In theory that shouldn't be possible but Google does a lot of business with the government and I'm sure they have access to data they shouldn't have. Or they could use AI to cross-reference my writing style, that would be doable with only publicly-obtained data. Writing style analysis is pretty advanced these days.

https://www.storyfit.com/blog/new-ai-emma-identity-detects-distinct-writing-styles

In any event, I have for the past couple of days been watching a lot of Sam Harris clips; and I think I can give a better answer to what it is that I don't like about him. Some things I like. He has a calming delivery and he gets off some good lines and has a way of verbally. clarifying the obvious. I just don't consider him particularly smart. Or at the very least, not particularly deep or interesting.

I originally said that I don't consider him very bright. And what I mean is, he's witty, but it's the wit of a precocious 16 year old who just discovered that the world doesn't work the way they were told. So he makes a joke about praying over your breakfast pancakes to turn them into God, in order to mock the Catholic belief that the wafers are literally the body of Christ.

Well ok, he's right about the analogy. The pancake image is funny. He has a great deadpan delivery.

But it's essentially a puerile observation. Many volumes have been written across the ages about the meaning of the Eucharist. Harris offers no scholarly insight into the practice. And say what you will, there are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. You can't dismiss their earnest and heartfelt beliefs with pancake jokes. A philosopher has to account for the undeniable power of religious faith in the hearts of so many of the world's people.

My recent Sam Harris binge has confirmed my original opinion. Puerile is the word. Childish, silly, trivial. He is entertaining and satisfies our pseudo-intellectual urges. But a deeper question would be why 1.2 billion people derive personal value in their lives from the wafers. I'm not a Catholic and I'm not religious. But I recognize the awesome power, for good and for evil, of religion in the world. Dismissing religion as superstitious claptrap makes some people feel good about themselves. But if we are to claim to be philosophers or "public intellectuals," we must give a thoughtful, intellectually satisfying account of those 1.2 billion. This, Harris does not do.

Harris is superficially clever but lacking in depth; and ultimately intellectually unsatisfying.

I think I basically agree with this. I don't know why but I always find Harris irritating - and not because I disagree with him. I think I agree with most of what I've heard him say - but everytime I attempt to listen/read - I just get irritated. Trivial is probably it. And his endorsement of David Pearce/Transhumanism struck me as dumb. But I've been meaning to give The Moral Landscape at least a chance the whole way through just because he seems to be fairly popular.

No one is quite like Sam but you might also like:

New, new atheists:

Steven Woodford (Rationality Rules)
Alex O'Connor (CosmicSkeptic)

Political/Social commentary:

Douglas Murray
Jonathon Haidt
Claire Lehmann

Science and Society

Bret & Eric Weinstein
Steven Pinker

Or maybe deep in the bowels of Google's servers, my comments here are linked to other aspects of my online identity, and they factor that into my Youtube suggestions. — fishfry

This site uses Google Analytics, which places a tracking code on every page, so that every time you visit a page, Google knows about it. Google also indexes page content, and of course Google owns Youtube. I don't know much about this technology, but theoretically, putting all this together, it is possible that the pages that you browse affect the choice of suggested videos. (I block google-analytics.com, and I keep Google login confined to those instances where I actually need it - although Google also keeps track of IP addresses.)

Harris is superficially clever but lacking in depth; and ultimately intellectually unsatisfying. — fishfry

This.

Thats the first sentence of a paragraph, which explains what exactly he meant by that. — DingoJones

Yes, he certainly goes on to explain what he means.

Perhaps you disagree with it, but thats not the same as “dumb”.

Nor are they mutually exclusive. IOW you just told me that the reason I gave it as an example of one of his ideas that I consider dumb is because I disagree with it. (and yes, you said, 'perhaps' but since it is obvious I disagree with it, so your reminding me of something I do not need to be reminded of/told, is assuming I conflate my disagreement with an idea with that ideas dumness.) This is mindreading. He's obviously a very smart person and he does make a case. However very smart people can make well thought out cases for ideas that are dumb. I think there are a lot of problems with treating thoughts/beliefs as the equivalent of actions.

What is it about that you think is dumb? — DingoJones

The combination of considering beliefs to be the moral and practical equivalent of actions AND a justification for torture is dumb. As in such a pernicious idea that goes against the core values of Western liberalism (not in the sense of conservative against liberal) that it is actually more aligned with the worst of Islamic fundamentalism than the culture it is supposed to be defending. We are not just attacking freedom of speech, with the combination of these ideas, we are attacking freedom of thought and belief. Something radical Islam, the supposed justification for this radical shift in values is supposedly against. I think that is dumb. I think it is dumb that he doesn't notice this, though, yes, he makes an intelligent, though flawed defense of his position. I also think it is dumb that he did not take responsibility for the problems created by his ideas, which were pointed out by many readers, and simply denied the conclusion. Saying one does not believe the conclusions that can logically be deduced from one's positions without explaining how the deduction is incorrect is dumb. Because he should know how people can use texts for their own ends, including violence. He should know that factions within the government like torture and would love to have an apologist for the justification of extending the use of torture to people based on beliefs.

Further he should know, as a modern intellectual, how people's beliefs can often extremely accurately be determined by the various social media companies. In fact they sell this information. And the intelligence services monitor this information. IOW once we have decided that beliefs are the same as actions AND we have a system in place to determine even unsaid (publically at least) beliefs, we have a machine of totalitarianism in place that rivals, say, Stasi and the current Iranian Islamic regime. I think it is dumb that he doesn't realize he is going against Western ideas and that his position, on this, share more with belief systems he does not like and wants to fight.

I think howeverly cleverly it is argued that we treat belefs as actions, it is dumb because of what an actual implementation of such a concept would lead to. And if someone wants to argue that terrorism is so bad that it's OK to treat Islam this way, governments tend not to contain/limit precedents, they extend them. Why only with some POTENTIAL crimes and criminals? the government or intelligence official can ask. I think it shows ignorance (that is, is dumb) of history and even of Enlightenment values.

IOW I think it is dumb how he doesn't seem to notice that he is going radically against Western values. Ones that for example removed us from the reign of conceiving heresy and blasphemy and atheism as crimes. What he considers punishable sins are different but it is dumb to not notice that the problem is not content by form. He is setting an anti-Western precendent and one heartily accepted by his enemies, the Islamic terrorists. Yes, we can treat your beliefs as actions. Or you lack of beliefs. You are not innocent.

But it's essentially a puerile observation. Many volumes have been written across the ages about the meaning of the Eucharist. Harris offers no scholarly insight into the practice. And say what you will, there are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. You can't dismiss their earnest and heartfelt beliefs with pancake jokes. — fishfry

Yes you can. Especially given the means of Catholic ubiquity (violence, war, incarceration, totalitarianism, etc.), that ubiquity is not a defence of any Catholic idea. And the worse the idea, the more theology is required to rationalise it, so the vast literature on the Eucharist is an indictment, not a defence. The Eucharist is an absurd practice, the absurdity held at bay only by normalisation through endless repetition and by unquestioned indoctrination. Like almost every aspect of religion, this does not demand a sophisticated rebuttal on the believers' own terms.

That said, Sam Harris has never impressed me either. I don't really get what the OP sees in him. He strikes me as a lefty Jordan Peterson type: a sufficiently eloquent orator to inspire and elevate an unpopular and underground movement, largely on the internet, but by no means an honest or insightful thinker. Maybe I've missed his finest hour on YouTube. If anyone has a link, I'm willing to learn.

The little exposure to Harris that I have is his fanboys on Wikipedia trying to act like the idea of a "moral science" is a Harris original, and not just yet another statement of ethical naturalism plus the insistence that we not actually philosophically examine that statement but just take it as a given and move on with doing "moral science" on his terms.

And I say this as someone who is generally very much behind the idea of something like a "moral science", but I think Harris has its foundations completely wrong, and those should be questioned; but questioning it doesn't mean we can't get on with doing actual good in the meanwhile.

Harris comes off to me (by proxy) as akin to a physicist saying "stop doing philosophy of science / epistemology / ontology, just accept [my preferred philosophy of science / epistemology / ontology] and get on with doing the science!" And even though I am a hard-core physicalist who thinks we definitely should continue being on with doing the science, that doesn't mean we don't need to defend and shore up its philosophical underpinnings against those who would sabotage the project from beneath.

but Google does a lot of business with the government and I'm sure they have access to data they shouldn't have. Or they could use AI to cross-reference my writing style, that would be doable with only publicly-obtained data. Writing style analysis is pretty advanced these days. — fishfry

Google Analytics, a product used to log visitors to websites that integrates with the company’s ad-targeting systems, was found on almost 70 percent of sites. DoubleClick, a dedicated ad-serving system from Google, was found on close to 50 percent of sites. The top five most common tracking tools were all Google-owned.

Google is practically Yog Sothoth at this point:

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread

And I say this as someone who is generally very much behind the idea of something like a "moral science", but I think Harris has its foundations completely wrong, and those should be questioned; but questioning it doesn't mean we can't get on with doing actual good in the meanwhile. — Pfhorrest

What is the foundations that Harris gets wrong?

What is the foundations that Harris gets wrong? — DingoJones

Ethical naturalism, basically. Which wouldn’t be such a problem is all he meant was “not supernaturalism” or “not divine command theory”, because those are even more wrong. But there’s a lot more nuances in metaethics he’s insisting that we should just ignore; there’s a lot of problems that naturalism and the alternatives he‘s probably thinking of have in common.

Thats not the argument he makes about morality. Also, Where does he make this insistence to ignore?
I assume you are referring to The Moral Landscape? You said you had “little exposure” to Harris, yet you seem pretty confident he is wrong so Im wondering where youre getting this from.

Like I said, this is the impression I've gotten from other people defending him, so I'm not surprised if some of his actual views have gotten lost or distorted along the way. I welcome corrections on what his actual views are.

Its hard to say without a specific reference, but it seems to me you’ve been misinformed, Harris fans or not.
His moral views start with the concept of “well being”, and whats good or bad is dependent on what relationship that thing has to well being. He makes his whole argument based on that, and he puts in the work to argue why its a valid axiom. I understand why someone would think he means ethical naturalism, but its not really where its grounded.
Thats the gist of his premiss fir The Moral Landscape, which I would say is the primary expression of his ethical views.

Sam Harris is in my opinion the absolute dumbest of the lot. He's just a stupid man that is — fishfry

Yeah, any person who says something as simplistic as this either hasn't truly engaged with the person they're condemning, or doesn't have the emotional intelligence to avoid equating someone they disagree with with "stupidity." Or, as is usually the case, they're simply envious of said person's success.

Sam Harris is by no means a stupid man, although I happen to disagree with him a lot.

Act less like an internet troll. Otherwise: try Twitter.

Thanks for trying to clarify, but that does sound pretty much like what his fans have said to me before.

What they’ve told me is that Harris wants to just give an operational definition of “good” as “conducive to human flourishing” or something along those lines, and then get on with figuring out what is conducive to human flourishing, putting aside any further arguments about whether “conducive to human flourishing” really works as a definition of “good”.

That kind of definition pretty much is the archetype of ethical naturalism, held by e.g. utilitarians. As it happens I think that “conducive to human flourishing” and “good” are more or less coextensive so it would be good to get on with figuring out what is conducive to human flourishing, but that doesn’t serve well enough as a DEFINITION, and bypasses a bunch of nuanced ethical and metaethical questions besides that.

Those questions are still worth looking into, and can be looked into simultaneously with doing a “science of morality” that is just investigating what causes human flourishing, just like we can still do science simultaneously with doing philosophy of science and don’t have to either wait for the latter to be finished before we do the former, or give up on the latter entirely since we can start doing the former without it.

What they’ve told me is that Harris wants to just give an operational definition of “good” as “conducive to human flourishing” or something along those lines, and then get on with figuring out what is conducive to human flourishing, putting aside any further arguments about whether “conducive to human flourishing” really works as a definition of “good”. — Pfhorrest

Well I dont think he is setting anything aside, but yes he posits the human flourishing as an axiom. He does make his case for that, its not just something he presumed.
When Harris refers to “science”, he is talking about reason and rationality. I never really understood why he did that, but he specifically spends time on it. To me it just confuses things needlessly.

Those questions are still worth looking into, and can be looked into simultaneously with doing a “science of morality” that is just investigating what causes human flourishing, just like we can still do science simultaneously with doing philosophy of science and don’t have to either wait for the latter to be finished before we do the former, or give up on the latter entirely since we can start doing the former without it. — Pfhorrest

See I dont recognise this restriction from anything ive read/heard. Im hardly an authority though so maybe these people had different info.

The devil is always in the details. What Harris thinks of as "human flourishing" is probably not the same thing I think of, although there's going to be a lot of overlap on the more obvious trivial stuff, like "more clean drinking water for everyone!". But even there, I can see Sam and I starting to diverge: should countries abandon, say, their space programs and put all those resources into providing clean drinking water for everyone and save 500,000 lives a year? Science can't answer that.

There can be those sorts of disagreements or divergence without effecting Harris’s arguments. Thats what the moral landscape means, the peeks and valleys of various moral questions and answers. He allows for multiple peeks (different but equally valid moral conclusions) and valleys (human suffering) that can all function from the same standard.



I think it would be worthwhile to do some reading or look into some of the debates/talks Harris did on The Moral Landscape. His arguments are pretty thorough and address most criticisms. Id be interested in discussing how I (or anyone else) disagree with Harris but I'm not keen on (probably poorly) trying to articulate his entire arguments piece-mail.

I don't think whether Harris' views on morality or free will bear on the question of the OP. One would expect the "smartest philosopher in the world right now" to maybe have a view that is immediately and apparently intelligent, but there's no basis to say he isn't that smart because of the way he views these issues and whether or not we agree with them.

The question as I see it is how he argues for it, and this is where Harris seems weak to me. I mostly know him from his speeches against religion, and he doesn't come across as particularly honest. For instance, he substitutes religion in general for specific religions and vice versa at will, casting the war between science and religion as a general religious problem because that's what suits that argument on the one hand but then demoting religion to an almost meaningless umbrella term when it becomes necessary to show how the violence and intolerance of a religion is driven by specific dogma (e.g. there are no Amish suicide bombers). I think honesty is a pre-requisite of intelligence.

I've never felt he argued eruditely (articulately, yes; wittily, yes), and this seems to be the main criticism those who would otherwise be sympathetic have. He describes the state of the art of fields and the consistent feedback, even from the likes of fellow horseman Dennett , is that he just doesn't understand those fields.

Maybe his books are better, but this does seem similar to the Lost fanboy argument: whenever I decided not to watch any more of it was coincidentally when friends who were fans insisted it "got good".

Dismissing religion as superstitious claptrap makes some people feel good about themselves. But if we are to claim to be philosophers or "public intellectuals," we must give a thoughtful, intellectually satisfying account of those 1.2 billion. This, Harris does not do. — fishfry

Good points fishfry. I can't say too much about Harris in particular, but your description seems a pretty good summary of atheist intellectual culture in general. Energetic and superficially clever, but not very deep or sophisticated.

As just one example, so much of the atheist discussion on philosophy forums and elsewhere seems to assume without questioning that religion is all about ideological beliefs, as if that was all there was to it. Culture, tradition, community, art, history, ceremony etc, all typically ignored.

To me, the most rational response to religion is not to accept or reject it, but to try to understand the human need that religion is attempting to address, and then find ways to meet that need that work for that person. Internet atheists rarely get this far, or even make the attempt. As you said, they are typically way too distracted by the "make people feel good about themselves" agenda.

He smart as Daniel Dennet, and Rickhard Dawkins.

To me, the most rational response to religion is not to accept or reject it, but to try to understand the human need that religion is attempting to address, and then find ways to meet that need that work for that person. — Hippyhead

That, in a nutshell, is the project of modernism. I disagree that the debate has been awaiting this sort of supply and demand. For instance, the religious appear to require creation narratives. That is common to most religions and describes an understandable desire for context.

Secularism has given us evolution and cosmology and this has gone down extremely badly with many religious, especially Christians, especially in America. The issue is not that secular science failed to address needs: it was deemed to fail because it was inconsistent with particular beliefs.

Evolution and cosmology are certainly interesting, but they don't really serve the need that fuels religions because they are intellectual, not emotional, experiences.

Science concerns itself with facts about reality. Intellectual.

Religion concerns itself with our relationship with reality. Emotional.

Two very different agendas.

What confuses the issue is that religions often make claims about reality in the effort to manage the relationship. Such claims are just the tip of the relationship management iceberg. Other techniques such as community, service, tradition, ceremony etc help illustrate that there is a larger agenda than just making factual claims.

If I understand correctly, Harris has an interest in meditation, which is good, as that's an attempt to address the underlying fundamental human needs which arise out of the nature of thought itself.

Secularism has given us evolution and cosmology and this has gone down extremely badly with many religious, especially Christians, especially in America. — Kenosha Kid

Depends how you define secularism. I would argue that using the scientific method doesn't mean that you are a firm proponent of metaphysical naturalism. But of course for those Christians that have problems with evolution or science in general are one type of Christian believers who think they are the true believers and others are perhaps only CINOs, "Christians in name only".

Depends how you define secularism. I would argue that using the scientific method doesn't mean that you are a firm proponent of metaphysical naturalism. — ssu

Irrespective of the views of the individuals, science is a secular discipline. It does not depend on the teachings of any church, is not constrained to study and report on that consistent with any church dogma, and does not consider historical texts absolute truth.