Sam Harris's Blog, page 8

An Evening with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (2)

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at a live event in Los Angeles (second of two). They discuss Richard’s experience of having a stroke, the genetic future of humanity, the analogy between genes and memes, the “extended phenotype,” Islam and bigotry, the biology of race, how to find meaning without religion, and other topics.

Friend & Foe

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Maajid Nawaz about the Southern Poverty Law Center, Robert Spencer, Keith Ellison, moderate Muslims, Shadi Hamid’s notion of “Islamic exceptionalism,” the migrant crisis in Europe, foreign interventions, Trump, Putin, Obama’s legacy, and other topics.

 

Maajid Nawaz is a counter-extremist, author, columnist, broadcaster and Founding Chairman of Quilliam – a globally active organization focusing on matters of integration, citizenship & identity, religious freedom, immigration, extremism, and terrorism. Maajid’s work is informed by years spent in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group, and his gradual transformation towards liberal democratic values. Having served four years as an Amnesty International adopted “prisoner of conscience” in Egypt, Maajid is now a leading critic of Islamism, while remaining a secular liberal Muslim.

Maajid is an Honorary Associate of the UK’s National Secular Society, a weekly columnist for the Daily Beast, a monthly columnist for the liberal UK paper the ‘Jewish News’ and LBC radio’s weekend afternoon radio host. He also provides occasional columns for the London Times, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among others. Maajid was the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate in London’s Hampstead & Kilburn for the May 2015 British General Election.

A British-Pakistani born in Essex, Maajid speaks English, Arabic, and Urdu, holds a BA (Hons) from SOAS in Arabic and Law and an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics (LSE).

Maajid relates his life story in his first book, Radical. He co-authored his second book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, with Sam Harris.

Twitter: @maajidnawaz

Edge Question 2017

Intellectual Honesty

Wherever we look, we find otherwise sane men and women making extraordinary efforts to avoid changing their minds.

Of course, many people are reluctant to be seen changing their minds, even though they might be willing to change them in private, seemingly on their own terms—perhaps while reading a book. This fear of losing face is a sign of fundamental confusion. Here it is useful to take the audience’s perspective: Tenaciously clinging to your beliefs past the point where their falsity has been clearly demonstrated does not make you look good. We have all witnessed men and women of great reputation embarrass themselves in this way. I know at least one eminent scholar who wouldn’t admit to any trouble on his side of a debate stage were he to be suddenly engulfed in flames.

If the facts are not on your side, or your argument is flawed, any attempt to save face is to lose it twice over. And yet many of us find this lesson hard to learn. To the extent that we can learn it, we acquire a superpower of sorts. In fact, a person who surrenders immediately when shown to be in error will appear not to have lost the argument at all. Rather, he will merely afford others the pleasure of having educated him.

Intellectual honesty allows us to stand outside ourselves and to think in ways that others can (and should) find compelling. It rests on the understanding that wanting something to be true isn’t a reason to believe that it is true—rather, it is further cause to worry that we might be out of touch with reality in the first place. In this sense, intellectual honesty makes real knowledge possible.

Our scientific, cultural, and moral progress is almost entirely the product of successful acts of persuasion. Therefore, an inability (or refusal) to reason honestly is a social problem. Indeed, to defy the logical expectations of others—to disregard the very standards of reasonableness that you  demand of them —is a form of hostility. And when the stakes are high, it becomes an invitation to violence.

In fact, we live in a perpetual choice between conversation and violence. Consequently, few things are more important than a willingness to follow evidence and argument wherever they lead. The ability to change our minds, even on important points—especially  on important points—is the only basis for hope that the human causes of human misery can be finally overcome.

Read the other responses on Edge….

[206 contributors; 143,000 words:] Scott Aaronson, Anthony Aguirre, Adam Alter, Ross Anderson, Samuel Arbesman, Simon Baron-Cohen, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Thomas Bass, Nicolas Baumard, Gregory Benford, Jeremy Bernstein, Laura Betzig, Susan Blackmore, Giulio Boccaletti, Ian Bogost, Joshua Bongard, Raphael Bousso, Stewart Brand, David M. Buss, Jimena Canales, Nicholas Carr, Sean Carroll, Leo Chalupa, Ashvin Chhabra, Jaeweon Cho, Nicholas A. Christakis, Brian Christian, David Christian, George Church, Andy Clark, Gregory Cochran, Jerry A. Coyne, Helena Cronin, David Dalrymple, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Luca DeBiase, Sarah Demers, Daniel C. Dennett, Emanuel Derman, David DeSteno, Diana Deutsch, Keith Devlin, Jared Diamond, Rolf Dobelli, Scott Draves, George Dyson, Nick Enfield, Brian Eno, Juan Enriquez, Nancy Etcoff, Dylan Evans, Daniel Everett, Christine Finn, Stuart Firestein, Helen Fisher, Tecumseh Fitch, Jessica Flack, Steve Fuller, Howard Gardner, Michael Gazzaniga, James Geary, Amanda Gefter, Neil Gershenfeld, Gerd Gigerenzer, Bruno Giussani, Nigel Goldenfeld, Dan Goleman, Beatrice Golomb, Alison Gopnik, Kurt Gray, Tom Griffiths, June Gruber, Hans Halvorson, Sam Harris, Cesar Hidalgo, Roger Highfield, W. Daniel Hillis, Michael Hochberg, Donald Hoffman, Jim Holt, Bruce Hood, Daniel Hook, John Horgan, Sabine Hossenfelder, Nicholas Humphrey, Joichi Ito, Nina Jablonski, Jennifer Jacquet, Matthew O. Jackson, Kate Jeffery, Koo Jeong A, Gordon Kane, Stuart Kauffman, Kevin Kelly, Katherine Kinzler, Gary Klein, Jon Kleinberg, Brian Knutson, Bart Kosko, Stephen Kosslyn, Kai Krause, Lawrence Krauss, Coco Krumme, Robert Kurzban, Peter Lee, Cristine Legare, Martin Lercher, Margaret Levi, Janna Levin, Daniel Lieberman, Matthew Lieberman, Andre Linde, Antony Garrett Lisi, Mario Livio, Seth Lloyd, Tania Lombrozo, Jonathan B. Losos, Ziyad Marar, John Markoff, Chiara Marletto, Barnaby Marsh, Abigail Marsh, Ursula Martin, John C. Mather, Ian McEwan, Hugo Mercier, Yuri Milner, Read Montague, Richard Muller, Priyamvada Natarajan, John Naughton, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Richard Nisbett,  Tor Nørretranders, Michael Norton, Peter Norvig, Hans Ulrich Obrist, James J. O’Donnell, Steve Omohundro, Bruce Parker, Irene Pepperberg, Clifford Pickover, Steven Pinker, David Pizarro, Robert Plomin,  Ernst Pöppel, William Poundstone, Robert Provine, Richard Prum, Matthew Putman, Steven Quartz, David Queller, Sheizaf Rafaeli, Lisa Randall, Abbas Raza, Azra Raza, Martin Rees, Diana Reiss, Siobhan Roberts, Daniel Rockmore,  Andrés Roemer, Phil Rosenzweig, Carlo Rovelli, David Rowan, Doulgas Rushkoff, Paul Saffo,  Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, Buddhini Samarasinghe, Robert Sapolsky, Roger Schank, Maximilian Schich, Laurence C. Smith, Simone Schnall, Bruce Schneier, Oliver Scott Curry, Gino Segre, Charles Seife, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Eldar Shafir, Michael Shermer, Seth Shostak, Gerald Smallberg, Lee Smolin, Dan Sperber, Paul Steinhardt, Victoria Stodden, Rory Sutherland, Melanie Swan, Tim Taylor, Max Tegmark, Richard Thaler, Frank Tipler, John Tooby, Eric Topol, Barbara Tversky, Athena Vouloumanos, Adam Waytz, Eric Weinstein, Linda Wilbrecht, Frank Wilczek, Jason Wilkes, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Victoria Wyatt, Itai Yanai, Dustin Yellin

 

The Putin Question

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Garry Kasparov about the problem of waning American power, the rise of Putin, the coming presidency of Donald Trump, computer chess, the future of artificial intelligence, and other topics.

Garry Kasparov spent twenty years as the world’s number one ranked chess player. In 2005, he retired from professional chess to lead the pro-democracy opposition against Vladimir Putin, from street protests to coalition building. In 2012, he was named chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Václav Havel. He has been a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal since 1991, and he is a senior visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School. His 2007 book, How Life Imitates Chess, has been published in twenty-six languages. He lives in self-imposed exile in New York with his wife Dasha and their children. His most recent book is Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.

When the Brain Won’t Change Its Mind

Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence

Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel & Sam Harris

Nature: Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 39589 (2016)

doi:10.1038/srep39589

Abstract

People often discount evidence that contradicts their firmly held beliefs. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms that govern this behavior. We used neuroimaging to investigate the neural systems involved in maintaining belief in the face of counterevidence, presenting 40 liberals with arguments that contradicted their strongly held political and non-political views. Challenges to political beliefs produced increased activity in the default mode network—a set of interconnected structures associated with self-representation and disengagement from the external world. Trials with greater belief resistance showed increased response in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and decreased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. We also found that participants who changed their minds more showed less BOLD signal in the insula and the amygdala when evaluating counterevidence. These results highlight the role of emotion in belief-change resistance and offer insight into the neural systems involved in belief maintenance, motivated reasoning, and related phenomena.

Go to journal…

Meme #4

An Evening with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (1)

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at a live event in Los Angeles (first of two). They cover religion, Jurassic Park, artificial intelligence, elitism, continuing human evolution, and other topics.

Meme #3

Reply to Robert Spencer

Over at Frontpage Magazine and Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer has published an essay titled “Sam Harris and the Collapse of the Counter-Jihad Left: A Failure of Nerve.” Here is my brief response:

Robert—

I’m sorry to say that your career as a mind reader is off to a poor start. In fact, almost every claim you make about me in your essay is false. Allow me to clarify a few points:

1. I didn’t oppose Trump because I’ve gone soft on Islam. I opposed him because I believe he is an ignoramus, a con man, and a malignantly selfish and unethical person. I’m now in the uncomfortable position of hoping I’m wrong.

2. I didn’t support Clinton because I’ve gone soft on Islam. I supported her—despite her countless flaws—because I judged her to be preferable to Trump. In fact, one reason I supported Clinton is that I thought she would act more aggressively against jihadists than Trump would. (You may recall that many Trump supporters, and even Trump himself, derided Clinton as a warmonger and worried that she would entangle us in further conflicts in the Middle East.) Of course, you may disagree with that assessment. You may even believe that killing jihadists isn’t the best way to frustrate their aims. These are fair points to debate. But I hope you will concede that my actual reasons for voting as I did (however misguided you may consider them) contradict what you have written about me.

3. Regarding Clinton’s public statements about Islam, and the money her foundation took from Islamist theocrats, I’m not aware of anyone who has criticized her more pointedly than I have. But (to turn this new cliché about Trump supporters around) I took Clinton “seriously but not literally” when she spoke about the war on terror. And I know, as you surely do, that she wouldn’t have trained her drones on the Amish. Despite Clinton’s obscurantism about Islam, I believe she understands that 100 percent of jihadists are Muslim. As you know, it’s possible to speak honestly about this state of affairs without being a bigot. In fact, I wrote a section of a speech that I thought Clinton ought to give, spelling out the link between Islamic doctrine and Muslim violence while disavowing bigotry:

https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/what-hillary-clinton-should-say-about-islam-and-the-war-on-terror

Needless to say, she didn’t take my advice. The point, however, is that I expected her to agree with what I wrote there. And for that reason I found her habit of dissembling about the religious roots of jihadism as galling as you did. As for my views about Muslim immigration, they are detailed in that speech. Once again, you may want to debate my reasoning, but please don’t question my motives. I oppose Islamism and jihadism as much as you do.

4. Although I cover many other topics in my work, I believe I have discussed the religious roots of jihadism as clearly as anyone has—and the book I wrote with Maajid Nawaz is no exception. If you think I’ve experienced a “failure of nerve” since Maajid and I wrote Islam and the Future of Tolerance, I invite you or any of your readers to find fault with my most recent statements on the topic. For instance:

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/what-do-jihadists-really-want

5. As for Keith Ellison, the only time I’ve mentioned him was in 2011. My remarks can be found here, and I suspect you will agree with them:

https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/honesty-the-muslim-worlds-scarcest-resource

I confess that I haven’t followed what Ellison has said since. Perhaps he has spoken with greater candor about Islam in recent years, and perhaps he hasn’t. Maajid didn’t consult me before endorsing Ellison to head the DNC, and I’ll leave him to discuss his thinking on that point. I can say one thing to a moral certainty, however: Maajid is no longer an Islamist. In fact, he is one of the bravest opponents of Islamism I know. He is also a tireless critic of identity politics as practiced by CAIR and similar groups. I’m confident that if Ellison turns out to be just another shady liar like Reza Aslan or Dalia Mogahed, Maajid will disavow him.

We each have a unique role to play in this war of ideas, Robert. And it would be only decent of you to recognize that Maajid has a harder job than either of us. In fact, the task he has set himself—to inspire a true commitment to secularism and liberal values throughout the Muslim world—may prove impossible. But the alternative is grim. I recommend that you stop questioning Maajid’s motives and give him your support—even if, for obvious reasons, he can’t afford to return the favor.

No doubt there is more to be said, but this short note will have to suffice for the time being. I invite you to publish it wherever you want. Perhaps it will clear up some confusion.

Sincerely,

Sam Harris

Missing Hitch

It has been five years, my friend.

Five short years since you taught us how to die with wisdom and wit. And five long ones, wherein the world taught us how deeply we would miss you.

Syria. Safe spaces. President Trump.

What would you have made of these horrors?

More times than I can count, strangers have come forward to say, “I miss Hitch.” Their words are always uttered in protest over some new crime against reason or good taste. They are spoken after a bully passes by, smirking and unchallenged, whether on the Left or the Right. They have become a mantra of sorts, intoned without any hope of effect, in the face of dangerous banalities or lies.  Often, I hear in them a note of personal reproach. Sometimes it’s intended.

You are not doing your part.

You don’t speak or write clearly enough.

You are wrong and do not know it—and it matters.

There has been so much to say, and no one to say it in your place.

I, too, miss Hitch.