Did anyone else here use to be a fan of Sam Harris, before rejecting liberalism? It is more obvious to me now that he has always been a complete idealist and a shallow thinker who is too quick to comment on subjects he knows nothing about, and can't handle criticism when he gets called out on it. But man has he gone off the fucking deep end lately.
He's buddies with complete hacks like Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Charles Murray and Jordan Peterson, while calling a neoliberal centrist like Ezra Klein a part of the irredeemable far left (he's still on the left though guys don't worry).
I think Kyle Kulinski had a good take on the evolution of Sam Harris over the years: youtu.be/wqyFwdfnac4?t=7m58s
Post your favorite Harris twitter meltdowns and examples of Intellectual Honesty (tm).
In my *tips fedora* (few months) period I always preferred Hitchens. Since then I learned what a hack Sam Harris is, not just on a political level, but with his quasi-religious meditation BS, and his irrelevant diploma "research" that doesn't qualify him to call himself any kind of scientist.
Dylan Ross
I was actually introduced to Sam Harris's works through a friend of mine, who was born to a relatively religious family but as a teenager started to question it and became kind if a new atheist. I think most of his ideals and morality make him a communist, but sadly he no is so propaganda and idiology infested, that he cannot really move away from Sam Harris and some liberal grade ideal socialism.
Tyler Gonzalez
Nope, even when I was a confused lib I knew that Israel was bad, and knew he was an Israel shill.
I'm not a burger (thanks g'd) so I've never been really interested in the neo-atheists, even though I was a raging anti-religious person (not that I like religion nowadays tho).
Liam Ramirez
bump
Michael Murphy
When i was coming out of religion Harris was helpful to me but not to any greater or lesser extent than any other atheist thinker i listened to.
While today i agree aith most if not all of the criticizms brought forward in this thread the one that i never agreed with that we always see leveled at Harris is his supposed islamophobia.
I studied islam in college for a couple years and the idea that violence is codified into the religion in a way that isnt there in almost all other major world religions is not only true, but is actually one of the best things about islam, if you are opperating under the assumption that Allah is real and Islam is correct.
If god exists why wouldnt he want you to administer society according to his laws and bring the one true religion to anyone and everyone through any means necessary, including violence. In this way islam is simultaniously more violent than and superior to christianity.
His ideas about the nonexistence of the self are retarded. And I have experienced ego death.
Grayson Price
Nah. Even when I listened to the New Atheists(TM) in the period when I was despooking myself of religious indoctrination he disgusted me. Dan Dennett is a nice bloke even if he's a bit of a pseud. Dick Dawkins is fundamentally an alright guy but he's grown jaded and overconfident from decades of arguing with idiot fundies trying to affect politics. Chris Hitchens (RIP in pieces) still is fun to watch rant at people who are shittier than he was. Sam Harris is probably the most obvious narcissist/psychopath I've ever seen, his politics and "contributions" to science and "philosophy" are laughable and gradeschool-tier, and his debates or criticism are always against the lowest-hanging fruit he can possibly find - shit that (as he says) any child can (and will) dismantle through basic questioning.
While Hitchens said some retarded political shit like justifying US interventionism, he never went as far as Harris who goes out of his way to justify drone strikes and to posit glassing the middle east as a realistic long-term solution to the violence there. I have a lot of issues with the way people use "Islamophobia" and conflate criticism of religion with racism, but he does whatever he can to remove the benefit of the doubt with regard to his criticism of Islam masking plain old racism. He's the final form of that dipshit who was good at math and got told he was very smart who based his identity around being smart and was thus too insecure to confront other areas where he wasn't smart (society/humanities).
iirc he supported Iraq II, but opposed cold war era western interventionism
John Rogers
I was a fan for a long time so I've listened to many, many hours of Sam Harris speaking, and I don't think he personally is "islamophobic" or has anything against people that speak arabic and have brown skin. I don't even like the term "islamophobia". But all the shit Sam Harris says about Islam and muslims is undeniably incredibly useful for people who want everyone to ignore decades of foreign invasions, bombings and coups in muslim majority countries and instead explain the situation in the middle east by saying that they're barbarians with a barbaric, violent religion, and western imperialism dindu nuffin.
Jonathan Hughes
wrong, he was a total neocon warhawk piece of shit fam
I never liked Hitchens and his like-minded ilk defending American imperialism even when I was a rightarded libertarian. It never made much sense considering the reason Islam was so reactionary in the first place was in response to western bombing campaigns for resources and oil. youtube.com/watch?v=cp4U3garYSs Obviously the apologists for imperialism eventually became Sargonites and classical liberals but the Four Horsemen of Atheism still have valid critiques towards theology. They're just proof that reactionaries can be secular as well.
Thomas Mitchell
He was more complicated than that. The dude wrote a book about how Kissinger was a war criminal.
In retrospect, it is easy to see how the Iraq war was ill advised and poorly executed. But in the early 2000s, after the whole world witnessed the failure of the international community to prevent genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, people felt differently.
we make decisions, we just don't have control over them
Ayden Jenkins
It's been years since I took a philosophy course, but iirc this is brainlet tier. There is no meaningful definition of free will which is compatible with a deterministic universe.
Luke Gonzalez
really makes you think….
Bentley Morales
medieval selection for high ashkenazi intelligence is HBD 101 do you even Zig Forums
No, americans did. I was there didn't felt different. I actually was really happy when 9/11 happend and threw a smoke bomb in a McDonald's that day
Brody Morgan
truly astounding
Kayden Ortiz
define we
determinism at best has the problem of induction and at worst is an assumption
Elijah Williams
explain?
the illusion of consciousness seems to be an emergent property that arises from billions of interconnected neurons in specific arrangements, but this is not the same as free will.
Our belief in determinism comes from its apparent existence (problem of induction) and it's arguably just an assumption because it's ontologically impossible to falsify or support determinism since you can't do multiple trials with the exact same conditions. What we think of as determinism is implied by quantum physics to merely the an averaging of probability at our scale. The question of emergence and the question of defining consciousness or free will aren't related in that way, which is why it's a non-sequitur to use the atomization of cognition as disproof of free will or consciousness.
Asher Smith
literally, what are you even talking about? My point was that complex properties and patterns can emerge in a system where no individual unit of those systems contains agency. Just because a property emerges from a system, that does not give any implication of subjective experience or agency on the part of the components that assembled into the pattern.
Christian Ramirez
Nowhere did anyone say agency is necessary for an emergent property to exist, so that's irrelevant. I said that agency is itself an emergent property.
Dominic Cook
Ok, but the question is more about the existence of agency itself, which I don't feel has ever been clearly established.
Landon Bennett
It's possible to describe the mechanism by which organisms make decisions. Whether this constitutes agency depends on the definition. If the definition is that a decision is made internal to the organism, then the "disproof" of will/agency is instead supporting evidence - it's a description of the process. If the definition is that some essence independent of matter makes a decision that the matter follows, then it is disproof. Even if the universe is deterministic, there is a decision making process. It would not be free of the deterministic input or its deterministic response thereto, but that doesn't mean it stops being a decision process. It's not even clear that the universe actually is deterministic which makes that not a sound argument anyway. Regardless of how you choose to value the decision process (which is the foundation of most disagreement when you get down to it), it still happens as an emergent property of the organism's biology (or a computer's circuitry).
Bentley Brooks
ah, I see. Empiricism is no problem for me. We can collate observations and make justifiable assumptions.
If these are the goalposts you erect for something to be knowable, then nothing is knowable.
Michael Clark
Indeed. In fact, one might make the argument that all matter in the universe is fundamentally involved in information processing.
Yeah, that's shitty. Just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean you should censor them. How do you know your opinions are good if you have nothing to compare them to?
Aaron Lewis
Sam Harris is a fascist piece of shit and fantastic example of the close relationship between new atheism and far right political thought.
He's a better example of the "muh free speech" idiots who simultaneously believe that ideas have supreme power to change the world but that they should not be held accountable for how they use this supreme power.
Gavin Gomez
Didn't pay much attention to Sam Harris but was into the New Atheism thing for awhile. In retrospect I feel like a lot of that flattered the biases and assumptions of a certain sort of comfortable, middle-class dude who thinks they know everything, sitting around in comfy armchairs discussing the moral arc of the universe (of which they're at the pinnacle). Despite being "skeptics" they are more like gurus and no wonder it has degenerated into a racket.
I'm also thinking of Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker.
"The ‘Reason’ which [Swift] so admires in the Houyhnhnms does not primarily mean the power of drawing logical inferences from observed facts. Although he never defines it, it appears in most contexts to mean either common sense — i.e. acceptance of the obvious and contempt for quibbles and abstractions — or absence of passion and superstition. In general he assumes that we know all that we need to know already, and merely use our knowledge incorrectly. […] He is in favour of civilization and the arts of civilization. Not only does he see the value of good manners, good conversation, and even learning of a literary and historical kind, he also sees that agriculture, navigation and architecture need to be studied and could with advantages be improved. But his implied aim is a static, incurious civilization — the world of his own day, a little cleaner, a little saner, with no radical change and no poking into the unknowable."
No idea but what always gets me are these photos of them doing a fish-eyed stare right at the camera. Like I said, gurus. Reminds me of Hindu cults led by guys like Sathya Sai Baba.
I used to listen to his podcast because I work night shift so I need like 20 hours of podcast/audiobooks a week to keep my sanity at my boring-ass job. I stopped listening when on one of them he went on a rant about how kids today think they can get everything for free and the only way he can produce "quality content" is by patreon supporters and then transitioned into bitching about socialism. No dude, I'm not going to pay you $20 a month for the privilege of listening to you sit in your underwear and babble about politics and philosophy 101 for an hour a week.
Be careful with your ears dude. You don't wanna give yourself hearing damage.
I love it when wealthy people bitch about not enough people giving them their money to listen to their hot takes. Sam Harris is from a wealthy family, he has written multiple bestselling books and the low estimate of what he makes on patreon is 20 000 fucking dollars per podcast (highest estimate 68 000). Now he's touring the world with other IDW hacks like Jordan B. Peterson, scamming a bunch of dorks into giving them 200 dollars for a ticket. But yeah it's actually a huge problem that not enough people are giving Sam Harris their money.
