Sam Harris's Blog, page 11

Racism and Violence in America

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris talks to economist Glenn C. Loury about racism, police violence, the Black Lives Matter movement, and related topics.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. He has taught previously at Boston, Harvard and Northwestern Universities, and the University of Michigan. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics (Northwestern University, 1972) and a Ph.D. in Economics (MIT, 1976).

Professor Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. He has been elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, Member of the American Philosophical Society, Vice President of the American Economics Association, and President of the Eastern Economics Association. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholarship to support his work.

As a prominent social critic and public intellectual, writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, Professor Loury has published over 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic. Professor Loury’s books include One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1995 – winner of the American Book Award and the Christianity Today Book Award); The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2002); Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK (ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005); and, Race, Incarceration and American Values (M.I.T. Press, 2008).

Glenn Loury hosts The Glenn Show on Bloggingheads.tv, and he can be reached on Twitter at @GlennLoury.

Books and articles discussed in this podcast:

Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic. June, 2014.

Thomas Chatterton Williams. “Loaded Dice.” The London Review of Books. December, 2015.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells. “The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” New York Magazine. July, 2015.

Jill Leovy. Ghettoside. Spiegel & Grau. 2015.

Roland G. Fryer, Jr. “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. July, 2016.

Glenn C. Loury. “Ferguson Won’t Change Anything. What Will?” The Boston Review. January, 2015.

Faith in Reason

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Eric Weinstein about the relationship between faith and reason and about some of the factors that make conversations on important topics so difficult.

Eric R. Weinstein is a managing director of Thiel Capital in San Francisco. He is also a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. Weinstein speaks and publishes on a variety of topics including, gauge theory, immigration, the market for elite labor, management of financial risk and the incentivizing of risk taking in science. He can be contacted on Twitter: @EricRWeinstein.

Articles mentioned in this podcast:

A. Koestler. “The Nightmare That Is a Reality.” The New York Times Magazine. January 9, 1944.

S. Harris. “Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy.”

Visual aid:

 

The Rubin Report #2

Complexity & Stupidity

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris talks to biologist David Krakauer about information, complex systems, and the future of humanity.

David Krakauer is President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. His research explores the evolution of intelligence on earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their generalities. He served as the founding Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and was Professor of mathematical genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He previously served as chair of the faculty and a resident professor and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has also been a visiting fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of Santa Barbara, a long-term Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and visiting Professor of Evolution at Princeton University. In 2012 Dr. Krakauer was included in the Wired Magazine Smart List as one of 50 people “who will change the World.”

 

For information about the Santa Fe Institute: www.santafe.edu

The article discussed in this podcast: The Empty Brain

Free Will Revisited

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with philosopher Daniel Dennett about free will.

Essays mentioned in this podcast:

Reflections on “Free Will”

by Daniel C. Dennett

The Marionette’s Lament

by Sam Harris

The End of Faith Sessions 2

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris reads and discusses the second chapter of “The End of Faith.” However, the first hour of this podcast focuses on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the political implications of the recent terrorist attack in Orlando. Discussion of The End of Faith begins at 1:04:30.

The Joe Rogan Experience #804

Wherein Sam and Joe talk for 4.5 hours…

Thinking in Public

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about the public understanding of science, his career as an educator, political atheism, racism, artificial intelligence, alien life, and other topics.

There’s No Such Thing As Free Will

by Stephen Cave

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What Makes Us Safer?

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with a leading expert on homeland security about the war on terror, profiling, Islamism, and other topics.

Juliette Kayyem is one of the nation’s leading experts in homeland security. A former member of the National Commission on Terrorism, and the state of Massachusetts’ first homeland security advisor, Kayyem served as President Obama’s Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security where she handled crises from the H1N1 pandemic to the BP Oil Spill.  Presently a faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she also is the founder of Kayyem Solutions, LLC, one of the nation’s only female owned security advising companies. Kayyem is a security analyst for CNN, a weekly show contributor on WGBH, Boston’s NPR station, and the host of the podcast Security Mom, also produced by WGBH.  In 2013, she was the Pulitzer Prize finalist for her columns in the Boston Globe.  A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Kayyem lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and three children. She is the author of Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home.