Sam Harris's Blog, page 10

What Is Moral Progress?

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with philosopher Peter Singer about the foundations of morality, expanding the circle of our moral concern, politics, free speech, conspiracy thinking, Edward Snowden, the importance of intentions, WWII, euthanasia, eating “happy cows,” and other topics.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He’s the author of Animal Liberation, The Most Good You Can Do, and many other books. His most recent book is Ethics in the Real World. He is also the co-founder of The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit devoted to spreading his ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty.

Website: www.petersinger.info

Twitter: @PeterSinger

Trump in Exile

It is a cliché, of course, to claim that a presidential election is the most important in living memory. But we arrived at that point in the 2016 campaign many months ago, when both sides declared their opponent unqualified for office. Unfortunately, this time the cliché is true, and one side is actually right. A choice this stark proves that there is something wrong with our political system.

Hillary Clinton is a terribly flawed candidate for the presidency, and this has allowed millions of otherwise sane Americans to imagine that she is less fit for office than Donald Trump is. Much depends on a majority of the electorate seeing through this moral and political illusion in the weeks ahead.

To consider only one point of comparison: We have now witnessed Donald Trump bragging about his sexual predations in terms that not even Satan himself could spin to his advantage. He has admitted to repeatedly groping women, kissing them on the mouth without their consent, and invading the dressing rooms of teenage pageant contestants to see them naked. Every day, more women come forward confirming the truth of these confessions. Trump has even said that he would have sex with his own daughter, were she the offspring of another man. He talks about his libido as only a malignant narcissist can: as though it were a wonder of nature, a riddle no mortal can solve, and a blessing to humanity.

Such disclosures should have ended Trump’s presidential campaign. But as luck would have it, Hillary Clinton is married to a man who can probably match Trump indiscretion for indiscretion. Indeed, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton are both trailing serious accusations of rape. Whether or not the worst of these charges are true, these are not normal men. Each has lived for decades as a roving id flanked by a security detail. Each is the very avatar of entitlement. However, only one of these cads radiates contempt for nearly every other member of our species. Only one has made humiliating people—and women in particular—a central part of his brand. Only one has become a troubled adolescent’s fantasy of what a man should be, exposing a ruinous insecurity and moral emptiness every time he opens his mouth. Most important, only one of these men is running for president today. And, personal ethics aside, only one is dangerously unfit for the job.

While Trump’s attitude toward women should be disqualifying, it is among his least frightening traits when it comes to assuming the responsibilities of the presidency. His fondness for Vladimir Putin, the whimsy with which he has entertained the first use of nuclear weapons, his disregard for our NATO alliances, his promise to use federal regulators to harass his critics, his belief that climate change is a hoax, his recommendation that we kill the families of terrorists, his suggestion that America might want to default on its debt—any one of these sentiments should have ended Trump’s bid for public office at once. In fact, Donald Trump is so unfit for the presidency that he has done great harm to our society by merely campaigning for it. The harm he could do from the White House can scarcely be imagined.

But hatred for both Clintons is now so blinding as to render Trump’s far more dangerous flaws imperceptible to millions of Americans. This is deeply disconcerting. Ask yourself, How would Trump appear if he were a malicious bully? The answer: Exactly as he does now. The man lies about everything, and yet he can’t even pretend to be a good person for five minutes at a stretch. How would Trump sound if he knew nothing about world affairs? One need only hear him speak to know. The truth is that Trump couldn’t have displayed his flaws more clearly during this campaign had his goal been to humiliate himself. And yet this hasn’t mattered to nearly half the electorate.

As many others have noted, there was a point in the second presidential debate when Trump’s campaign ceased to be a depressing farce and became the terrifying, national disgrace we now see before us. The crucial moment wasn’t when Trump threatened to imprison Clinton if he wins in November—it was the shriek of joy this threat produced in half the audience. That was the sound of our democracy unraveling. And there was Trump, the crazed man-child tearing at the threads.

If there is a silver lining here, it is that many of us now see how vulnerable our political system is to charlatanism, conspiracy theories, and populist unreason on both the Right and the Left. The role that the media has played, rendering us all moths to the Trumpian flame, will be scrutinized for years to come. The truth about us is sobering: We have been playing with our smartphones while hurtling toward the abyss…

Hillary Clinton will almost certainly be the next president of the United States. And, with any luck, she will usher in four years of exquisite boredom. Unfortunately, the toxicity of this campaign seems unlikely to dissipate. There will be a surplus of anger to be discharged—not just among disappointed Trump supporters, but toward them. Those who stood with Trump, as the wrecking ball of his ego swung dangerously through our lives, will likely find that their reputations have been destroyed. I will be surprised if we hear anything from Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani ever again. Trump himself should be forced into exile the way OJ Simpson was after he was falsely acquitted of two murders. In fact, one might say that a murder has been committed here—of the public good—by a monster of selfishness and self-regard.

After November, let the shunning of Donald Trump be complete.

The Frontiers of Political Correctness

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Gad Saad about political correctness, academic taboos, Islam, immigration, Donald Trump, and other topics.

Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and the holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. He has held Visiting Associate Professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California–Irvine. Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. His works include The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature; The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption; Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, along with 75+ scientific papers, many at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and a broad range of disciplines including consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics. He received a B.Sc. (1988) and an M.B.A. (1990) both from McGill University, and his M.S. (1993) and Ph.D. (1994) from Cornell University.

YouTube Channel: The Saad Truth

Twitter: @GadSaad

TED Talk: Can we build AI without losing control over it?

The End of Faith Sessions 3

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris reads and discusses the third chapter of “The End of Faith.” Topics include: Christianity, Judaism, the Inquisition, witchcraft, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

Ask Me Anything #5

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris answers questions from listeners about how 9/11 changed his life, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, free will, why he podcasts, Milo and the alt-Right, identity politics, Clinton vs. Trump, vegetarianism, and the Hannibal Buress episode.

Being Good and Doing Good

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Oxford philosopher William MacAskill about effective altruism, moral illusions, existential risk, and other topics.

William MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was educated at Cambridge, Princeton, and Oxford. He is one of the primary voices in a movement in philanthropy known as “effective altruism” and the cofounder of three non-profits based on effective altruist principles: Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. William is the author of Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference.

The New Phrenology?

An article by Kate Murphy in the New York Times discusses a recent controversy in the field of fMRI over statistics. Although Murphy correctly observes that flawed methods of data analysis are a problem in neuroimaging, she falsely implies that our 2009 study of the neural correlates of belief employed the methods in question. Here is the letter that Mark S. Cohen, the senior author on that paper, sent to the Times.—SH

Mark S. Cohen is a Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, Radiology, Psychology, Biomedical Physics and BioEngineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. Further information can be found at www.brainmapping.org/MarkCohen.

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To the Editors:

In her opinion piece, “Do You Believe in God, or is that a Software Glitch,” Kate Murphy explores two very real problems: that science in the modern era often accepts a statistically low probability of error as a proxy for truth, and that analytic methods have become too complicated for many scientists to deeply understand.

Murphy calls out “fM.R.I.” (sic) as a glaring exemplar of the problem. As one of the earliest workers in the field, and as the senior author on the paper she references in the title and text, I feel compelled to comment.

The idea that fMRI has the potential for sloppy use has actually escaped no one. Shortly after its invention, I wrote an editorial drawing attention to the fact that this truly groundbreaking method of peering into our thoughts and consciousness carried with it the potential to become a quantum physics-based means of neo-phrenology [1]. That dual-edge of technology exists in proportion to its power in computers, genetic engineering, and in essentially any method that engages humans in interpreting results.

As scientists our core method is to form a hypothesis, then to devise a test that can controvert it. As data become more extensive, we rely on statistics and probability as a check against overenthusiastic belief in our guesses. Few understand that the science lies in the care that is placed in the theories, rather than in the calculated probabilities. The fMRI literature contains thousands of papers with very little prior theoretical basis, substituting instead a post-hoc speculation to explain the statistical findings; bad science, to be sure.

In the months since its publication, the paper by Eklund, Nichols and Knutsson [3] has been debated strenuously by the neuroimaging community. While some scientists responded defensively, as Murphy herself pointed out, researchers in this field have long been alarmed by the potential for statistical abuse. Scientists like Poldrack, Poline, Yarkoni, Nichols, and many others, have worked with passion and diligence to do whatever is possible to protect the integrity of the discipline, but scientists share the same foibles as all people: we are biased by our own beliefs and by our desire for recognition. Nothing, and certainly not statistics, can really protect us from this enthusiasm.

The technical issues in the math and statistics used in fMRI data analysis are manifold: assumptions about sphericity, autocorrelation, spatial point spread functions, random field theory, and other abstruse factors are demonstrably false, yet we use them because they frequently are the best approximations available given our current state of knowledge. To me, however, the most damning observation in the Eklund, et al., article was their discovery that a disproportionate number of published “positive” results came from labs that used a single piece of code that was discovered later to contain a numerical error that made it more likely to find “significant” results. For those of us who do the work, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that many researchers actively selected this tool because it was known to produce rosier pictures: a truly remarkable level of self-deception, bordering on the delusional.

I will stand happily by the work of ours that was cited, almost mockingly, by Ms. Murphy [2]. In planning those experiments, we were well aware of the potential for controversy, and were at great pains to use the most rigorous methods available to us at the time. We did not cherry-pick for the tools that gave us the results we preferred. Does this make our conclusions correct? Of course not, but neither does the fact that statistics is a flawed science make us wrong.

In the end, good scientists are highly critical of every instrument, algorithm, measurement, calibration standard, and analysis program they use. It is inexcusable to be too lazy to question methods just because the tools are complicated to understand. Of course, it is equally inexcusable for journalists to accept each new observation with wide and unblinking eyes. The fMRI method has protected countless patients in surgery. It has given us a means to communicate with seemingly locked-in subjects, it has given us crucial insights into the nature of psychiatric and neurological diseases including schizophrenia, epilepsy, autism and addiction. And yes, it is flawed.

Mark S. Cohen

References

1. MS Cohen, “Functional MRI: A Phrenology for the 1990’s?” Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging,  6: p. 273-274. 1996.

2. S Harris, JT Kaplan, A Curiel, SY Bookheimer, M Iacoboni and MS Cohen, “The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief.” PLoS One,  4(10): p. e0007272. 2009.

3. A Eklund, TE Nichols and H Knutsson, “Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science U S A,  113(28): p. 7900-7905. 2016. PMCID: PMC4948312

What Hillary Clinton Should Say about Islam and the “War on Terror”

The following is part of a speech that I think Hillary Clinton should deliver between now and November. Its purpose is to prevent a swing toward Trump by voters who find Clinton’s political correctness on the topic of Islam and jihadism a cause for concern, especially in the aftermath of any future terrorist attacks in the U.S. or Europe. —SH

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Today, I want to talk about one of the most important and divisive issues of our time—the link between the religion of Islam and terrorism. I want you to know how I view it and how I will think about it as President. I also want you to understand the difference between how I approach this topic and how my opponent in this presidential race does.

The underlying issue—and really the most important issue of this or any time—is human cooperation. What prevents it, and what makes it possible? In November, you will be electing a president, not an emperor of the world. The job of the president of the United States, even with all the power at her or his disposal, is to get people, both at home and abroad, to cooperate to solve a wide range of complex problems. Your job is to pick the person who seems most capable of doing that.

In the past, I’ve said that groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda have nothing to do with Islam. And President Obama has said the same. This way of speaking has been guided by the belief that if we said anything that could be spun as confirming the narrative of groups like ISIS—suggesting that the West is hostile to the religion of Islam, if only to its most radical strands—we would drive more Muslims into the arms of the jihadists and the theocrats, preventing the very cooperation we need to win a war of ideas against radical Islam. I now see this situation differently. I now believe that we have been selling most Muslims short. And I think we are all paying an unacceptable price for not speaking clearly about the link between specific religious ideas and the sectarian hatred that is dividing the Muslim world.

All of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, must oppose the specific ideas within the Islamic tradition that inspire groups like ISIS and the so-called “lone-wolf” attacks we’ve now seen in dozens of countries, as well as the social attitudes that are at odds with our fundamental values—values like human rights, and women’s rights, and gay rights, and freedom of speech. These values are non-negotiable.

But I want to be very clear about something: Bigotry against Muslims, or any other group of people, is unacceptable. It is contrary to the values that have made our society a beacon of freedom and tolerance for the rest of the world. It is also totally counterproductive from a security point of view. However, talking about the consequences of ideas is not bigotry. Muslims are people—and most of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims simply want to live in peace like the rest of us. Islam, however, is a set of ideas. And all ideas are fit to be discussed and criticized in the 21st century.

Every religious community must interpret its scripture and adjust its traditions to conform to the modern world. Western Christians used to murder people they believed were witches. They did this for centuries. It’s hard to exaggerate the depths of moral and intellectual confusion this history represents. But it is also true that we have largely outgrown such confusion in the West. The texts themselves haven’t changed. The Bible still suggests that witchcraft is real. It isn’t. And we now know that a belief in witches was the product of ancient ignorance and fear. Criticizing a belief in witchcraft, and noticing its connection to specific atrocities—atrocities that are still committed by certain groups of Christians in Africa—isn’t a form of bigotry against Christians. It’s the only basis for moral and political progress.

One thing is undeniable: Islam today is in desperate need of reform. We live in a world where little girls are shot in the head or have acid thrown in their faces for the crime of learning to read. We live in a world where a mere rumor that a book has been defaced can start riots in a dozen countries. We live in a world in which people reliably get murdered over cartoons, and blog posts, and beauty pageants—even the mere naming of a teddy bear. I’m now convinced that we have to talk about this with less hesitancy and more candor than we’ve shown in the past. Muslims everywhere who love freedom must honestly grapple with the challenges that a politicized strand of their religion poses to free societies. And we must support them in doing so. Otherwise, our silence will only further empower bigots and xenophobes. That is dangerous. We are already seeing the rise of the far right in Europe. And we are witnessing the coalescence of everything that’s still wrong with America in the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Now, it is true that this politicized strain of Islam is a source of much of the world’s chaos and intolerance at this moment. But it is also true that no one suffers more from this chaos and intolerance than Muslims themselves. Most victims of terrorism are Muslim; the women who are forced to wear burkhas or are murdered in so-called “honor killings” are Muslim; the men who are thrown from rooftops for being born gay are Muslim. Most of the people the world over who can’t even dream of speaking or writing freely are Muslim. And modern, reform-minded Muslims, most of all, want to uproot the causes of this needless misery and conflict.

In response to terrorist atrocities of the sort that we witnessed in Paris, Nice, and Orlando, we need to honestly acknowledge that we are fighting not generic terrorism but a global jihadist insurgency. The first line of defense against this evil is and always will be members of the Muslim community who refuse to put up with it. We need to empower them in every way we can. Only cooperation between Muslims and non-Muslims can solve these problems. If you are concerned about terrorism, if you are concerned about homeland security, if you are concerned about not fighting unnecessary wars and winning necessary ones, if you are concerned about human rights globally, in November you must elect a president who can get people in a hundred countries to cooperate to solve an extraordinarily difficult and polarizing problem—the spread of Islamic extremism. This is not a job that a president can do on Twitter.

I want to say a few words on the topics of immigration and the resettlement of refugees: The idea of keeping all Muslims out of the United States, which my opponent has been proposing for months, is both impractical and unwise. It’s one of those simple ideas—like building a wall and deporting 11 million undocumented workers—that doesn’t survive even a moment’s scrutiny. More important, if you think about this purely from the point of view of American security, you realize that we want Muslims in our society who are committed to our values. Muslims like Captain Humayun Khan, who died protecting his fellow American soldiers from a suicide bomber in Iraq. Or his father, Khizr Khan, who spoke so eloquently in defense of American values at the Democratic National Convention. Muslims who share our values are, and always will be, the best defense against Islamists and jihadists who do not.

That’s one reason why the United States is faring so much better than Europe is. We have done a much better job of integrating our Muslim community and honoring its religious life. Muslims in America are disproportionately productive and prosperous members of our society. They love this country—with good reason. Very few of them have any sympathy for the ideology of our enemies. We want secular, enlightened, liberal Muslims in America. They are as much a part of the fabric of this society as anyone else. And given the challenges we now face, they are an indispensable part. 

Despite the counsel of fear you hear from my opponent, security isn’t our only concern. We also have an obligation to maintain our way of life and our core values, even in the face of threats. One of our values is to help people in need. And few people on earth are in greater need at this moment than those who are fleeing the cauldron of violence in Iraq and Syria—where, through no fault of their own, they have had to watch their societies be destroyed by sectarian hatred. Women and girls by the tens of thousands have been raped, in a systematic campaign of sexual violence and slavery. Parents have seen their children crucified. The suffering of these people is unimaginable, and we should help them—whether they are Yazidi, or Christian, or Muslim. But here is my pledge to you: No one will be brought into this country without proper screening. No one will be brought in who seems unlikely to embrace the values of freedom and tolerance that we hold dear.  Is any screening process perfect? Of course not. But I can tell you that the only way to actually win the war on terror will be to empower the people who most need our help in the Muslim world.

The irony is that my opponent in this race, who imagines that he is talking tough about terrorism and ISIS and Islam, has done nothing but voice inflammatory and incoherent ideas that, if uttered by a U.S. president, would immediately make the world a more dangerous place. Being “politically incorrect” isn’t the same as being right, or informed, or even sane. It isn’t a substitute for actually caring about other people or about the consequences of one’s actions in the world. It isn’t a policy. And it isn’t a strategy for winning the war against jihadism, or a war of ideas against radical Islam…

What Do Jihadists Really Want?

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris reads from the latest issue of Dabiq, the magazine of ISIS, and discusses the beliefs and goals of jihadists worldwide.

A PDF of Dabiq 15 can be downloaded here.