#Sam Harris

[entheognosis]

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?

Sam Harris

[maaarine]

The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling | ContraPoints

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"There is no such thing as Islamophobia. Bigotry and racism exist, of course—and they are evils that all well-intentioned people must oppose. And prejudice against Muslims or Arabs, purely because of the accident of their birth, is despicable. But like all religions, Islam is a system of ideas and practices. And it is not a form of bigotry or racism to observe that the specific tenets of the faith pose a special threat to civil society. Nor is it a sign of intolerance to notice when people are simply not being honest about what they and their co-religionists believe." -- Sam Harris

When you're called an "Islamophobe" for literally just copying and pasting from the quran, you figure out pretty quickly that it's a fake charge.

[liskantope]

From time to time -- and in total quite a lot of times -- I hear someone say something along the lines of "Whenever a story comes out about a white man committing mass murder, everyone / the media tries to come up with circumstances or conditions he may have had or focuses on his mental illness to make excuses about his behavior, whereas if it's a man of color who committed mass murder, everybody / the media jumps to the conclusion that he did it out of evil."

I keep on hearing this claim confidently asserted and have no idea what evidence it's tied to, because I've never actually seen any. I'm not claiming in this post that it's necessarily wrong, just that I've never been aware of any evidence going one way or another, I've certainly never observed anything like that, and so I'm a little befuddled by the claim.

This may be partly because the bubbles I've been immersed in for the past fifteen years, as well as most of my news media, has a very progressive bent. Then again, during the last five or so of those years I've also had a fairly steady diet of contrarian IDW-ish voices in my YouTube queue and I still haven't noticed the white mass murderers receive tons of speculation about their mental illnesses and bad circumstances while black or brown mass murderers are met with "Evil!" and a pointed finger.

What I have noticed is that mass murderers (at least in this part of the world) are mostly white men (a fact that people on my social media from time to time like to explicitly point out), which may be a reflection of which mass murders I'm most likely to be hearing about but likely reflects a phenomenon which is real. The exceptions to this trend tend to be Muslims committing murder in the name of Islamic extremism, I suppose, which is a motive that IDW-ish people (like Sam Harris) like to make as much of as possible and could be interpreted as pointing a finger and shouting "Evil!" in opposition to finding a mental illness or adverse circumstance, although I'm kind of inclined to disagree and say it's a third thing. But again, this is quite a minority of mass murder stories I hear about. If there are frequent stories of mass shootings by black or brown people, they just aren't reaching my radar, whether or not "everyone" / "the media" judges these hypothetical people with minimal charity as claimed.

[revelation29]

Sam Harris says that there's a conflict between women's rights and trans PEOPLE's rights, that JK Rowling is being silenced... He seems to think that he can distinguish between people who "truly suffer from dysphoria" and people who fell victim to the 'social contagion' of trans activism.

I'm listening to the episode of his podcast with Megan Phelps. Yes Megan Phelps, who says that her family at Westboro were loving, educated people with critical thinking abilities. And those people didn't even think that Harry Potter was bad.

So they're talking about JK Rowling, who was an absolute victim, they think.

The horsemen of atheism are all turning out to be either misogynists or transphobes.

[lenbryant]

Morality is out there.

[humanbeanvitaminsea]

"Jews are just the canaries in the coal mine"- Sam Harris

Ex Muslim Yasmine Mohammed talks with Sam Harris about anti semitism, Israel, Palestine and jihadism. Must watch for anyone still calling the current conflict against Hamas a "genocide".

[entheognosis]

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?

Sam Harris

[nicklloydnow]

“At this moment in history, there are people and cultures that harbor very different attitudes about violence and the value of human life. There are people and cultures that rejoice, positively rejoice—dancing in the streets rejoicing—over the massacre of innocent civilians; conversely there are people and cultures that seek to avoid killing innocent civilians, and deeply regret it when they do—and they occasionally prosecute and imprison their own soldiers when they violate this modern norm of combat.

There are people and cultures who revel in the anguish of hostages and prisoners of war—who will parade them before cheering mobs, and often allow them to be assaulted, or raped, or even murdered. They will desecrate their bodies in public, and all of this carnage is a cause for jubilation. Conversely, there are people and cultures who find such barbarism revolting—and, again, would be inclined to prosecute anyone on their own side who took part in it.

In short, there are people and cultures who revel in war crimes—and who do not hide these crimes or their celebration of them but, rather, proudly broadcast their savagery for all the world to see. Conversely, there are people and cultures who have given us the concept of a war crime as a sacred prohibition—and as a safeguard in the ongoing project of maintaining the moral progress of civilization.

(…)

Consider just one of these norms: Whenever an armed conflict breaks out, some groups will use human shields, and others will be deterred, to one degree or another, by their use. To be clear, I’m not talking about the taking of hostages from the opposing side for the purpose of using them as human shields. That is appalling, and it is now happening in Gaza, but it is separate crime. I’m talking about something far more inscrutable—it’s astounding, really, that it happens at all—I’m talking about people who will strategically put their own noncombatants, their own women and children, into the line of fire so that they can inflict further violence upon their enemies, knowing that their enemies have a more civilized moral code that will render them reluctant to shoot back, for fear of killing or maiming innocent noncombatants. If anywhere in this universe cynicism and nihilism can be found together in their most perfect forms, it is here.

Jihadists use their own people as human shields routinely. Hamas fires rockets from hospitals and mosques and schools and other sites calculated to create carnage if the Israelis return fire. There were cases in the war in Iraq where jihadists literally rested the barrels of their guns on the shoulders of children. They blew up crowds of their own children in order to kill US soldiers who were passing out candy to them. Conversely, the Israeli army routinely warns people to evacuate buildings before it bombs them.

Of course, during times of war, it common to dehumanize one’s enemy, to describe them as barbarous and evil. And it is natural for ethical and educated people to distrust such politically-charged language. But pay attention: I’m describing concrete behaviors—behaviors that occur on only one side of this conflict.

Just consider how absurd it would be to reverse the logic of human shields in this case: Imagine the Israelis using their own women and children as human shields against Hamas. Recognize how unthinkable this would be, not just for the Israelis to treat their own civilians in this way, but for them to expect that their enemies could be deterred by such a tactic, given who their enemies actually are.

(…)

Do you see what this asymmetry means? Can you see how deep it runs? Do you see what it tells you about the ethical difference between these two cultures?

There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil in our world, but this is one of them.

(…)

Simply counting the number of dead bodies is not a way of judging the moral balance here. Intentions matter. It matters what kind of world people are attempting to build. If Israel wanted to perpetrate a genocide of the Palestinians, it could do that easily, tomorrow. But that isn’t what it wants. And the truth is the Jews of Israel would live in peace with their neighbors if their neighbors weren’t in thrall to genocidal fanatics.

In the West, we have advanced to a point where the killing of noncombatants, however unavoidable it becomes once wars start, is inadvertent and unwanted and regrettable and even scandalous. Yes, there are still war crimes. And I won’t be surprised if some Israelis commit war crimes in Gaza now. But, if they do, these will be exceptions that prove the rule—which is that Israel remains a lonely outpost of civilized ethics in the absolute moral wasteland that is the Middle East.”

“Foucault wrote about how “epistemes” define the thinking for entire epochs of human thought. We are cursed to live through a “paradigm shift” where the idea of civilization, progress, culture and morality are under assault.

An “episteme” or “regime of truth” is an underlying idea that people hold that is so deeply rooted in culture that it is unconscious. Epistemes, metaphorically, are the intellectual water we swim (or think) in. Just as a fish cannot discover water, a human cannot easily distinguish the epistemes their thought is grounded in, or oriented around.

One such broadly acknowledged episteme is “progress.” For centuries. people believed that rational thought and human endeavor generally improve things over time. This episteme is thought to have developed during the early Enlightenment, when rationality started producing remarkable improvements to human life. “Progress” was so undeniable, that it soaked into our thinking at a profound (literally foundational) level, to become and episteme.

(…)

The identity-based view has really taken off. Marxism has been such a miserable failure everywhere it was embraced that it lost credibility. But an appeal to identity is an appeal to tribalism — and it turns out tribalism is baked into humans at a deep, biological level, so is more palatable even if it has not yielded very good results either.

So neo-Marxists today claim that identity differences are the main obstacle to humanistic flourishing, rather than wealth or class, and view the world through the lens of which identity groups are involved, and which is more powerful vs less powerful.

About three months ago, on October 7th, Hamas perpetrated a massive, brutal terror attack in Israel. Since then, there has been a fundamental disconnect in how people interpret the situation. The older, mainstream view is that terrorism is always wrong, but the “Oppression-oriented New Left” view is that whichever identity group is stronger within a power dynamic is always wrong.

(…)

Our system of international laws and norms has evolved to make war somewhat less terrible. While it may seem that war itself is fundamentally “uncivilized,” war with some restraints is actually as high a level of civilization as we have been able to achieve so far.

The different views on the Hamas war align with the ideological split between people who support civilization/progress and those who focus on dismantling systems of oppression.

To the oppression group, Hamas is weaker, more brown, Muslim, and “colonized.” (Colonization is a huge marker for oppression within the oppression-oriented group.)

(Most of that is not true, but that does not matter much. E.g. most Israelis are brown descendents of Arab Jews expelled in the mid 20th century from other countries in the Middle East. Israelis are also descended from a combination of indigenous, immigrant and refugee communities.)

To the civilization/progress group, not legitimizing terrorism, rape and kidnaping is critical, because it represents a hard-won international norm of how conflicts — even violent conflicts — are resolved.

(…)

Personally, I favor civilization over terrorism. I favor the idea progress over a false narrative that nothing ever improves and society must be rebuilt from the roots up on a foundation of tribalism. That idea has had only divisive and dysfunctional impact so far.

[maaarine]

Sam Harris:

"There are details of how he [Sam Bankman-Fried] behaved with people, that struck me as arrogant to the point of insanity.

In these investors' calls, he's describing his business and soliciting hundreds of millions of dollars from firms, and he is simultaneously playing video games.

This is celebrated as this delightful affectation.

But clearly he's someone who thinks he need not give 100% of his attention because he's got so much bandwidth he can just play video games while having these important conversations.

And there are things in Michael Lewis' book that revealed that he was quite a strange person.

He claimed that he didn't know what people meant when they said they experienced the feeling of love.

So he's neuro-atypical at a minimum.

Shouldn't there have been more red flags earlier on in terms of his integrity or capacity for ethical integrity?

If someone tells me that they have no idea what one means when they say they love other people, that is an enormous red flag.

Collaborating with this person, putting trust in them, it's an enormous red flag."

William MacAskill:

"On his inability to feel love, that's not something that was striking or notable to me.

After the Michael Lewis book and lots of things came out, it seemed like he had emotional flatness across the board.

Whether this was a result of depression or ADHD or autism, it's not clear to me.

But that wasn't something that seemed obvious at the time.

I guess I interact with people who are relatively emotionally flat quite a lot, [chuckles]."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"I would challenge anyone here to think of a question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one." -- Sam Harris

Believers need science and secular morality to tell them which parts of their religions are metaphors and which parts are - currently - "true."

[thekidyouforgot]

While it can seem noble enough when the stakes are low, pacifism is ultimately nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure of the world’s thugs. It should be enough to note that a single sociopath, armed with nothing more than a knife, could exterminate a city full of pacifists. There is no doubt that such sociopaths exist, and they are generally better armed.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith

[doylewesleywalls]

[suometar]

“As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now.

And I think that this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind.

In fact, I think, there’s probably nothing more important to understand about your mind, than that, if you want to be happy in this world.

The past is a memory; it’s a thought arising in the present.

The future is merely anticipated; it is another thought arising now.

What we truly have is this moment.

And this.

And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth, refuting it, fleeing it, overlooking it.

And the horror is that we succeed.

We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfilment there, because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future.

And the future never arrives.

It is always now.

However much you feel you need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now.

Even when we think we’re in the present moment, we’re, in very subtle ways, always looking over its shoulder, anticipating what’s coming next.

We’re always solving a problem.

And it’s possible to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment.

And enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present.”

- - Sam Harris - -

[boyrobottz]

tendonitis can kiss my ass

[philipmitton]

The Pour St. John Restaurant – Fergus & Trevor by Sam Harris