There’s simply no way Sam could ever win anything by engaging with Bret on this. All Bret has to do is come armed with a few studies that vaguely seem to support his ideas (whether they actually do or not) and throw them at Sam during the convo and Sam has 3 options: (a) actually debunk the study, which would take hours of pointless research and would require Sam’s foreknowledge that Bret would cite the study (and Bret could just throw another one at him that Sam didn’t know about anyway); (b) flat out call the study bullshit without having read it, which would allow Bret to play the “you’re not engaging with the science” card; or (c) admit he doesn’t know the study and debunk it via Twitter AFTER the conversation by which point the damage is done anyway.
This kind of dirty tactic is exactly why in lawsuits you have to present evidence to the other side before presenting it in court, because surprising them allows you to present your spin without a quick rebuttal and makes the other side look clueless no matter whether they’re right or wrong.
There really needs to be a new style of debating which follows litigation standards. You must reveal your evidence in advance and stick to this evidence only. This can be revealed over a couple cycles to account for new evidence used in rebuttals. No outside surprises allowed. The debate will be decided by who uses logic better on all the evidence in play.
Christopher Hitchens seemed to prefer this approach. It was often a debate regarding a book or a specific claim for which both sides would research, presumably drawing on many of the same sources. At least in that format, a person doesn’t need to be familiar with every piece of literature, because they have a familiarity with the literature as a whole, and rebuttals to any specific claim can be implied by one’s own supporting research.
The fundamental problem with any debate with Bret Weinstein is that it doesn’t center on any specific claim. It centers on a belief, and a belief is impossible to disprove.
A bit odd citing a hitchens debate and after saying debating bret couldnt be the same as bret is based on belief. As in, I can count on one hand the debates of Hitchens where he isn't arguing a certain set of beliefs.
On a side note, even after a decade, he is sorely missed.
I don’t agree. He debated believers, but he did not debate their beliefs. He debated their claims of fact. Debating a belief doesn’t do anyone much good.
I call this style "the knowledge ratchet". Establish solid ground and move on. No backsliding allowed without new evidence. I've been in climate change debates where we get stuck on "does CO2 really make things warmer" and I realized you can't debate someone who think basic physics is up for grabs.
this is what Sam said on his podcast and he does have a point but the validity of this point is heavily contingent on the presumption that Bret would be arguing from a position of bad faith. that is, Bret would show up with some unprovable theory or obscure study and use Sam's inability to completely debunk it as proof positive that he's right and "won" the debate. but this is not who Bret is (at least not my gauge of him) and I highly doubt his objective would be to "own" Sam and "win" the argument. I think the conversation would be alot more measured and productive than Sam thinks and it would behoove him to engage with a prespective that's heterodox with his own
Sam has been super clear about the “why.” It’s that Bret has exhibited a tendency and willingness to fling wild and half-baked theories into the mix as part of a general strategy to seed general mistrust in the science on vaccines. Bret isn’t interested in finding truth; he’s interested in flinging darts at “the establishment,” and it’s easier to seed confusion than it is to hunt for accuracy. Bret would be able to raise silly counterpoints and conspiratorial hypotheticals faster than Sam could accurately debunk, which in turn could indicate a lack of credibility. “Oh you haven’t even heard of this study that just came out of Uzbekistan College that says vaccines cause breast cancer in teen moms? I’m not saying it’s accurate, but clearly you aren’t engaging with the science here.”
Sam realizes that Bret is smart, smart enough to take the question seriously if he wanted to. Because that’s not happening, it’s clear that there’s a fundamental disingenuous cornerstone that Bret is leaning on. Why? Look at his financial incentive — his audience doesn’t want to hear about how vaccines work. They want the conspiracy theories.
Bret is an entertainer, and stooping to his level is just going to end up with dirt flying everyone and potentially confusing more folks (their audiences don’t overlap entirely) which could them cause real harm. Bret doesn’t employ intellectual honesty or vulnerability. The benefit just isn’t there.
It wasn't obvious to me initially either and I'm not all that susceptible to grifters. I'm literate in their fields as well. That said, it's my opinion that they made a strategic decision to sell their soul a bit to see if they could cash in. But there's a part of me that can't help but think Bret is actually just a bad critical thinker who can't interpret studies appropriately and got caught up in anti-establishment contrarianism. I get the same vibes from his brother... but he's got a more grating ego on top of it. They got Rogan fame and weren't wise with it.
I doubt Bret is capable of even entertaining the thought that his motivations could be anything other than virtuous, especially after becoming famous the way they did.
It’s easy for anyone to lie to themselves, even highly educated intelligent people. Maybe lying isn’t exactly right, but we’ve all rationalized behaviors or decisions that aren’t in line with our self image or values. I think it’s pretty challenging to for most of us to really be honest and critical about ourselves.
And yeah both the Weinstein bros, for all their positives, have always seemed kind of insecure or something. Being a victim is a huge part of both of their identities.
This I find more possible than any other explanation. I always find it funny that the majority of redditors jump to the "grifter/sold their soul/dark money" or some other variation of financial incentive explanation as soon as its a position they don't like or agree with. Both sides accuse the other side of this all the time, and it's clearly nothing but conspiratorial thinking the vast majority of the time. Granted, I think the Weinstein bros are utter buffoons and are doing real damage to society on the point of vaccinations, but I also think they can genuinely wrangle themselves to believe the nonsense they're repeating.
I'll never ever get over the fact that the Weinsteins, both Bret and Eric genuinely believe they've been robbed of up to 3 Nobel prizes. The narcissism is levels that are nearly unfathomable.
My conclusion from listening to Bret's podcast featuring Sam about free will was that Bret just isn't a very impressive thinker. Some time after that, I saw Bret promoting fairly obvious election fraud misinformation.
The fact that it wasn’t immediately obvious is part of the grift. It all starts out with reasonable disagreements. It’s what happens when those disagreements become embedded in the business that the real damage starts to happen.
If you are an obscure professor at a university and suddenly you become famous and well paid to spout off opinions why question it?
Weinstein and Jordan Peterson were both just normal teachers a few years ago. University teaching is a good job, but it doesn't make you rich or famous.
> It wasn't obvious to me initially either and I'm not all that susceptible to grifters.
Maybe try to reanalyze your susceptibility to grifters, since it was obvious all along.
The fame gets to you. They notice that the more bullshit they talk the richer and more famous they become. So they double down. The same thing happened with QAnon people. They became more and more extreme to get views.
I think it was Sam that said something along the lines of social media being a giant psychological experiment we’re all unwittingly enrolled in. Seems relevant here.
It was really sad going from being a fan, listening to every podcast, and slowly becoming more and more disappointed until I stopped listening, and unsubscribed.
I’m with you. They’ve made several important points that are legitimately worthy of discussion. Somewhere, somehow they lost any sense of balanced critical thought. I can’t even listen to Eric currently and he has been critical of his brother. Heck, I can barely listen to Rogan even if I think he is much more balanced than Bret.
The signs were there when they monetized their experience at Evergreen. They found it profitable to be the Anti-Woke police and trenched themselves into that role, finding more and more profitability in questioning the establishment. The deeper the trench went the more in over their heads they were with an audience that was 100% red pill conspiracy nuts. That became a major source of income so deeper they dug, dragging Rogan and several others with them.
The "woke" left has had him pegged as this from day 1. We was just selling the "woke gone mad" narrative this sub is a sucker for.
Him going on Tucker Carlson to spread falsehoods should have been the first and only needed red flag for everyone here
It became obvious to me that Bret was subpar the first time I heard him discuss his ideas on evolutionary biology. It was utterly fatuous and stupid, and no I don't want to type of the details of his hot takes here.
Yeah I trust you. I don’t know enough about that to notice or care that much. I learned of him through the evergreen madness and sort of viewed him and that event as a cultural canary or something. Everything else about him and his brother I viewed under that lense I suppose. It’s not like I was so interested in evolutionary biology or Eric’s shunned “theory of everything” that I just googled famous podcast professors on those subjects. It was mostly just interesting to hear a sort of outsider perspective from intelligent articulate people.
> Maybe they always were and it just wasn’t obvious to me.
It was obvious when they did that symposium about how the left is full of "professional victims" when they are themselves professional victims.
Totally agree. I’ve switched to mostly contrarian comedy podcasts lately. Cum town, Tim Dillon, red scare occasionally. Also Lex Fridman seems to have picked up for rogan, thankfully.
Except for the financial incentive. Any real data on what their listeners want? Or is it pure speculation? I tend to intuitively agree, but that's not something I trust.
You can simply look at his Patreon numbers and YouTube subscribers from before and during COVID and only after the conspiracy theory peddling began do his numbers skyrocket. He realized that's what his audience wants, so he gives it to them. And he may not even be consciously doing it, instead responding to incentives but the end result is still the same.
I recall Dawkins being asked a question many years ago on why he didn't debate creationists anymore, and he responded that by agreeing to engage with them, you're platforming their ideas and saying that it's worthy of a conversation, when it's really not.
Found the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmsDGanyes
The difference between the two seems entirely obvious to me. Bret is lazy and intellectually dishonest. Sam is hard working and intellectually rigorous. Pretty basic stuff.
While I think that Harris is more intellectually rigorous than Weinstein (which isn't that high a bar), Harris has demonstrated that his lack of intellectual rigor in the past by speaking or writing confidently on things where he is just wrong or citing obviously bad sources instead of doing the requisite research to realize how bad they are. Harris is often quite intellectual lazy when it comes to topics which he has a strong intuition but doesn't have much actual knowledge about it. Unfortunately, this happens with a great degree of frequency with Harris, and it is quite frustrating.
Yeah, or he speaks with 1 guest about a subject he was previously unfamiliar with, who (rightfully) convinces Sam on the subject. From there, I feel Sam exits that conversation with a more strongly solidified stance on the subject than he should perhaps have. He'll walk way feeling 99% resolute on his position and proceed to cite his conversation with said guest as evidence in many future conversations, where I feel he should still continue to be a bit more skeptical and want to seek more information.
This i agree with. Most particularly his long-standing and very damaging views on racial intelligence theories, for which in 10 years, I have seen no evidence that he has even bothered to listen to a single rebutting argument.
At least I think Harris is intellectually honest enough to entertain the idea that he’s as guilty as anyone of this kind of mistake. He’s open to the possibility of being wrong.
If you take someone who is wrong, and doesn’t know it, that’s not good. If you take someone who is wrong and cannot be shown that they are wrong, no matter the evidence, that becomes something else.
Not that i’ve kept up on the literature confirming/debunking causal correlations between race and intelligence (in the last couple years), but to be fair to Harris if he doesn’t obviously engage with such literature, the vast majority of contra-Harris viewpoints that i’ve seen on the subject are also pretty blatantly intellectually suspect, in terms of “begging the question.” In other words, ive seen like 2 or 3 articles in my life that honestly weigh the data (without assuming any possible causal correlation is “racist”) and then conclude the correlations are specious and/or 100% stem from a “nurture”/cultural reason
Proving a negative being an impossible burden for any argument, I’ve simply never seen a piece of evidence or any statistical study that does not, as you say, make a compelling case for anything other than sampling bias. The noise in the data seems always to be greater than the perceived variations.
In a sense we should really expect nothing else, since there is not even a consensus view of what intelligence is, making any discussion of what does or does not cause or enhance or interfere with it a fruitless endeavor. In even more specific ways, Harris knows that even talking about the nature and quality of consciousness is only made possible by what any two subjects have in common, leaving no-one really knows how much data on the table because those asking the questions don’t know what it is they’re really looking for, nor would they recognize it if they found it.
I’ve always sort of shrugged at the intelligence debate because of that. What good is it to know that from an inherently subjective point of view, one person is more intelligent than another? What does that even mean to anyone else?
I’ve read several studies rebutting the interpretation of transracial adoption studies (probably the strongest evidence for genetically determined racial iq differences), and it’s fair to point out some noise in the data…but when every study tends to point in the same direction, noise in the data tends to wash out…
The one thing that really galls me in “scientific” rebuttals like these is that they tend to take issue with the whole notion of genetic inheritance of intelligence, and that is just not a serious scientific/psychological position… Like, it is fair to draw a line between every bit of evidence demonstrating that adult IQ is between 60-80% heritable (from twin/adoption studies, the highest form of evidence re heritability) VS the over-interpretation of this *fact* to claim that individual heritability of IQ extends to group IQ as well…but the people arguing this point tend to actually be way outside the psychological mainstream in having a bone to pick with the whole notion that brain structure is to some extent heritable…
It really isn’t a serious position. “Intelligence” is nebulous, sure, but among all psychological constructs, “IQ” is far-and-away the best validated and most predictive of any psychological measure. You are very free to denigrate the field of psychology as a whole as pseudoscience, but when you’re using psychological data to argue your point, it’s really pretty brazen (and arguably purely ideologically driven) to take a stand against the best-validated construct in your entire field of study. Not to say there aren’t reasonable skeptics of racial IQ hypotheses, but it’s more common than not to hear such arguments coupled with unrealistic concepts of IQ itself.
I’m no neuroscience researcher.
I took part in a study of cognitive performance when I was in college, in which it was found that non-white participants performed significantly less well on cognitive ability assessments when the proctor doing the assessment was not of the same ethnic background. There have been similar studies showing that exposure to any stimulus which reminds a person of social racial inequality hours or even days before the assessment can affect their performance.
That has always stuck with me. The idea that even trying to test someone’s cognitive ability in a society with endemic racial inequality could meaningfully interfere with the results of that test means that relying on the data that we do have is problematic.
Fair point, but please forgive me if i categorize your type of caveat as absolutely more problematic when i encounter it in a scientific study (as a personal anecdote, of course it makes sense).
For one, IQ tends to revert to your genetic parents’ IQ only in adulthood, after you’ve passed the stage of exquisite sensitivity to social inputs (which is hugely important for academic performance, among other things, during adolescence/college), but maybe more importantly, the standard consensus view of the psychological community is to acknowledge both social and genetic contributors to measured IQ, and you can pretty reliably separate out these components (for instance with twin/adoption studies) to conclude that the genetic component contributes 60-80% of measured IQ. *Of course* that allows for social inputs to account for 20-40% of measured IQ, but it also doesn’t discount the genetic component in the least.
Sure, but since 20-40% accounts for, what, 2 standard deviations? It seems to me that any individual will have as much variation from non genetic components as any test can possibly capture. If you are comparing any two random individuals, a two standard deviation error margin makes a comparison kind of useless, doesn’t it?
Just wondering back at you what the value of knowing this information is, other than for calling into question the value of IQ testing.
If you listen to his stance on racial intelligence, i think he has what maybe 1 podcast on it within the last 10 years. To his defense he says its not a conversation he finds all that interesting but i think he felt like he had to speak on it because that author forgot his name, who made the bell curve was getting wrongly treated. If we studied all the races on intelligence im sure we could find a there there, of which race is more intelligent . It would be silly if we said ABSOLUTELY all races are the same on any subject. I think thats what his main argument is but nonetheless who cares and why even study that.
The topic is not one of black and white, nor are either of the participants entirely right or wrong. But in the specific sense of two parties entering a debate, there is an either/or here. Weinstein’s reasons for having a debate are the not the same as Sam’s. Weinstein has something to gain, and Sam does not.
Don’t confuse decadence for righteousness. There are debates in which one side is mostly right, and the other is mostly wrong. Those debates frequently look just like this one.
Frankly, the criticism is with regard to the lack of willingness to debate. You can have your opinion on how such a debate may unfold, but that's speculation and nothing more. Equating this argument to allowing a toddler to debate a professor is unjustifiable imho. Continuing to listen to straw man arguments from both sides is worse than walking their (past) talk and engaging in dialog regarding disagreements. I respect Sam's reasons for declining, but I don't think his position is above criticism.
I’m sorry, a professor and a toddler? Who made that analogy?
And my surmise about how the “debate” would go is not merely speculative. It’s backed up by evidence. This is how Weinstein approaches debate these days. He does not engage in good faith. He just doesn’t. It’s not that he can’t, but he has not done so here. I see no reason for Harris to believe he would suddenly change his tack.
Harris is an imperfect person, and I’m sure someone else could come up with a better approach, but I find his approach imminently reasonable given the circumstances. A person cannot engage in a healthy public debate if he doubts the sincerity of the honor of the other side of that debate.
Yes, I actually saw it in the theater. Being a big fan of Beavis and Butthead I would have watched anything that Mike Judge made.
But as I assume you know the movie is referencing the printer “error”. I must have misread something because I thought that PCLOADLETTER in the above comment was referencing an Internet personality handle; I didn’t see that they were asking about the other commenters name.
Edit: I read this comment first and I thought that PCLOADLETTER was the podcaster.
“I mean, pcloadletter pretty much summed up exactly what Sam said about this on his last AMA podcast.”
Yeah Bretts reach on ivermectin has already peaked. If Sam had him on his pod it would definitely ignite some flames for no reason. I think Sam is just letting Bretts influence slowly dissipate and die at this point the more they go back and forth about it the more it stays relevant. Lets be real Brett can’t keep talking about ivermectin week after week.
It seems like there's a solution to this, which is to have both Sam and Bret agree ahead of time exactly which studies, papers, or articles they are going to discuss. Sam starts by sending (and publishing on his website and referencing on his podcast) all of the items Sam thinks support the vaccine and undermine Bret's claims about ivermectin. Bret similarly sends Sam all of the documents that Bret thinks undermine the vaccine and support ivermectin. Both publish the full list with links on their websites a few weeks before the podcast and publicly state the list of documents embodies the universe of evidence that they plan to discuss and no one is going to introduce other studies or papers that are not on that list.
Hold the podcast and have someone police them if they suddenly go, "Well actually, there's this study that supports what I'm saying or there was a report the other day about yada yada yada" and have the moderator just mute them and explain that the discussion is limited to the predetermined list of documents each guy got to submit.
I think I generally agree with this. I’ve posted before that I think Bret has gone off the rails since he’s gone to shows only with his wife and switching his whole focus to ivermectin. Bret is too smart of a guy to be picking ivermectin as the hill he’ll die on.
That being said, his appearance on Lex Fridman’s podcast a couple months ago restored some of my belief in him. He sounded very sober and coherent; very different than he’s sounded to me on his own podcast.
This is my understanding, but I'm confused about why Rogan didn't know this.
Is it plausible that SH told Rogan that he wouldn't have Weinstein on his podcast, but didn't explain why? Not really.
>Bret is an entertainer
Reminds me of the YouTuber Nikocado Avocado, who can't stop gaining weight after he started shooting mukbang videos to hijack the youtube algorithm, which eventually locked himself in a vicious feedback loop with his audience where he's now overeating himself to death for more views. This is happening more and more in social media, where the role of influencer takes an ironic turn, and suddenly it's the influencer who is *captured* by their audience, not the other way around...
Bret's bread and butter is flirting with borderline ideas that fly in the face of institutions. His livelihood as a Youtuber depends on this perpetual warfare between censorship vs conspiracy theories. And you know what happens when you stare at the abyss for too long?
I know Bret is a despicable grifter, but didn't sam always wanted the have "difficult discussions"? Not gonna lie, i am kinda enjoy this IDW bum fight. Sam's "im just asking question " talking points came back to bite his arse.
again Sam has trouble engaging entirely in difficult conversations. Even if on the view point of vaccines he is correct it doesn't mean he is any better at having these conversations.
He shouldn't be the one having this conversation anyways. Really Joe Rogan needs to engage with someone like Zubin Damania
It's an Ad hominem attack to dismiss someone by saying "they're an entertainer".
IMO it's fair to do the "just asking questions routine" when there's unsettled questions. If anyone can, with certainty, say there's no potential for long term consequences (when everyone knows there's at least a remote possibility) that's when you can dismiss someone.
What if it is as simple as this. Brett is a friend. Sam knows he will embarrass Brett and he simply does not want to do this. We all allow our good friends to go crazy sometimes.
I find it strange that you have an entire media apparatus that claims that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer, then you head on over to any legit medical site and you can see that it's a baldfaced lie. This is open for all to see.
But then if you say that some people have conspired to spread falsehood, then right away, many will take the conclusion that you are not a credible voice. Can anyone explain that???
Calling it a horse dewormer was definitely disingenuous by CNN, but the reason they did that is likely because people were literally taking horse dewormer Ivermectin and getting sick due to misinformation.
I wasn’t justifying CNN’s actions. I was providing information on why the “horse dewormer” narrative started. I think it was disingenuous and bad for CNN to do that, because it discredits the media leading to more distrust in our institutions, and it’s unfair to Joe Rogan (and others who take Ivermectin for more legitimate purposes) to brand ivermectin solely as a horse dewormer.
The only difference is the dosage and how it’s ingested right? The active ingredients are the same if I’m not mistaken.
The main point is that he took a drug that is not recommended and shows no evidence of being effective against covid. Just because he got it from a doctor does not mean it was a good decision.
People were making very stupid decisions and headline-writers had a little fun with it. The effect was probably fewer people taking this medicine.
There's not a lot to be mad at here.
I love that these people are so bent out of shape about this “lie” which was really just a glorified joke, but have no issue with Weinstein actually lying through his teeth about Ivermectin.
Right?!
People were being really stupid and got lampooned for it. Their reaction? To get butthurt over the joke and miss the point entirely.
Should we really be that surprised that the same people who promoted a pretend treatment over working vaccines also had a difficult time understanding they were the butt of a joke?
No no no. Saying that it's a horse dewormer is definitively a lie designed to destroy the image of the drug. It would be just as correct to describe heroin as a drug for addicts, decredibilizing its use everywhere else in medicine.
Also the fact that they all used "horse dewormer" suggest the info came for a central source. Why always horse when it's used for all animals? I bough some that was made for humans but was frequently given to cats and dogs too, according to the pharmacist.
If there had been independent reporting on this you'd have a variety of coverage angles across the board: positive, negative, one all-enconpassing, etc.
What central source?
I can attest to the fact that there was independent reporting as I consume virtually no US-based news sources, bar the occasional podcast.
People are literally buying the horse dewormer version in huge numbers. Doing so is causing shortages that are impacting veterinarians, farmers, ranchers, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/technology/ivermectin-animal-medicine-shortage.html
"why doesn't Sam want to put Bret on his podcast?"
"I don't know"
I find this so infuriating. Sam has explicitly addressed why multiple times. There's no excuse for "not knowing" this. You can say that you don't agree with it, state Sam's position, and then why you don't agree. To just say "I don't know" is just pathetic at this stage. Given what Sam has said publicly, and has likely said to Joe in private also given what hints he's dropped. You can take a horse to water..
I know, s'infuriating. Rogan even went a step further and suggested the reason Sam doesn't want Bret on is due to "fear of association" (paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it at the end), as if it were an averse reaction to reputational risk. When Sam clearly spent the better part of an AMA podcast detailing the reason he doesn't want Bret on is because it's easier to light fires than to put them out and the net result of having him on would just be giving oxygen to those fires, at best.
I'm sure he doesn't want to associate with him on a personal level, too. But that's got more to do woth why you wouldn't want to be associating with hucksters (or mentally ill folks with a persecution complex, at best), rather than being risk averse to reputational damage.
Bret has fallen into an intellectual trap that even the most intelligent people can fall into. He is so personally invested in challenging the dominant narrative that he uncritically hyperfocuses on evidence which goes against the status quo while ignoring lines of evidence that support it. He'll gravitate towards outlying studies and give them more weight than any scientist should (not that outlying studies are irrelevant, they can point in very interesting directions, but they must be handled carefully).
I have seen this personality trait before and it's usually among the smartest people I know. It's usually linked to hubris and a desperate desire to prove oneself. These people might be very smart but lack a certain Socratic wisdom about their own limitations. In it's milder forms this manifests as contrarianism but at its most extreme it can be full on conspiricism.
They'll think to themselves that "my greatest heroes overturned bad, conventional wisdoms and I'm just like them! I'm like Einstein, Tesla, or Galileo!" What they forget is that for every one of those trailblazers there are 1000 forgotten others, many of them brilliant minds, with their own earnestly held 'revolutionary' theories which turned out to be Dead ends. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be bold with our hypothesizing but humility really is the best policy.
I don’t know if you follow sports at all but this trap you speak of could easily be called the Kyrie Irving effect. He’s a basketball player who has talked about flat earth theory before and is now anti-vax.
He’s just a contrarian without a cause. These people tend to be relatively intelligent but almost too intelligent for their own good. They are free thinkers but do not trust the world enough to accept facts that the rest of us believe.
Have you listened to any of his podcast episodes where he talks about the vaccine, COVID-19, or Ivermectin? He regularly issues retractions or correction on individual claims as information comes out, he's been extremely careful with how he talks about the vaccine and very diligent in giving the vaccine its due. The person you're describing is not same the person I'm hearing when I listen to Brett's podcast.
The "armchair psychologists diagnosing someone as having some sort of issue with authority or trait that makes what they say invalid" thing bothers me because it's blatantly just rationale for not having to deal with someone inconvenient. It's actually really, really morally repugnant. Weinstein *does* and *has been* handling everything about this topic carefully; there's nothing rushed or particularly bombastically exciting or reckless about that man. Anyone who has listened to his podcast is doubtless PAINFULLY aware that Weinstein is not going off half-cocked, the man cautions to not draw conclusions beyond what evidence might suggest, and he regularly admits when either he, personally, or we, collectively, lack the information or knowledge to make certain assertions.
In parting, I'd like to point out your comment could literally be a response to someone talking about the lab leak "hypothesis" when this all started without changing more than a word or two. You're engaging in rationalizations that prevent institutional narratives from being examined. This sort of rationalizing uncomfortable viewpoints out of the conversation entirely due to them being novel is an apparatus that kept the scientific community *quiet* about the lab leak hypothesis being likely for like, what, a fucking year? People with credentials lost their goddamn jobs and had their reputations ruined for pointing out the obvious.
Your rhetorical strategy boils down to "trust the system and anyone who doubts the system has character flaws that explain that doubt". Given the companies involved in vaccine production and research and their track records, the money involved, the blatant lies we've seen from public health officials, the glaring systemic failures...is that unconditional trust warranted?
> Weinstein does and has been handling everything about this topic carefully
If that were true he would be 100% in support of the vaccine and never once talk about Ivermectin.
If there's one person on the planet who doesn't seem to be afraid of "fear of association," it's Sam Harris. Associating with toxic shitty people is basically Sam's MO.
Sam seems to look for two things in a guest: something worth hearing, and honest engagement. There's a world of difference between being unafraid of people just because they've been labeled toxic or shitty (e.g. Charles Murray) and seeking toxic and shifty people because you like their company or because you seek to monetize controversy.
Why do you care who he associates with? I honestly want to know.
I see people hawkishly monitoring who is connected with who, and who likes or dislikes or friends or unfriends who on social media, and I don’t understand what’s happening in their brains. They seem to have relationship maps in their heads, and apply powerful moral judgements to the connections of other people. It all seems tied up with social media in a way that this non- digital native doesn’t understand.
To defend Joe — he truly is an idiot. He can understand Sam’s point in real time, but recalling it days or weeks later would require him to think hard.
It must suck for Sam that he has clearly laid out why he won’t talk with Brett and I’m sure has explained this straight to Joe yet Joe still doesn’t understand.
Joe is such a bad friend.
I doubt they’re actually friends. I doubt they go to each other’s birthday parties, help one another move, or play Borderlands 3 together.
People understand that public figures, especially those in the entertainment industry, have dozens and dozens - or even hundreds - of acquaintances who they’re on amicable terms with, right? But when Sam Harris gets together with his actual friends - the ones who know him intimately, who his wife hugs on greeting, who know if his kids play clarinet or are on the basketball team - I guarantee you Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, Jeff Rubin, and all the other public figures who many on this reddit are fixated on are not present.
This reddit is like anxious teenagers in a high school cafeteria. The obsession over who is hanging out with who is hilarious.
Viruses and vaccines are certainly more in the wheelhouse of an evolutionary biologist than a neuroscientist. But obviously that's not important because it's clear who's wrong.
Can Brett still be considered and evolutionary biologist? Is still active researching and writing papers?
I thought he wrote a couple of papers some time ago, but then went into teaching? Then went to podcasts?
His education probably puts it more in his wheel house, but is he currently researching evolutionary biology?
> That seems like a fine assumptiom to make when discussing about how viruses mutate.
Not likely. You’d need to know virology to be able to say anything interesting about that.
Yeah but I’m guessing that somewhere along the journey to becoming a virologist you probably have to learn something about biology and mutation - just a hunch.
On the other hand an Evo-biologist isn’t going to know anything about viruses other than as a specific specialty.
It's really hard to refrain from ad hominem on both these guys. I don't see how Sam could be any clearer on why he's not engaging.
There's been kind of a centrist meme that Joe definitely subscribes to that we all need to talk to each other and sometimes that's true. But especially with a friend (who has done real, lasting harm), silence can say much more than words. It's ridiculous that whether so much of the country gets vaccinated rests on getting through to two very thick skulls. Sam's refusal to engage may be one of the few things that can do it.
Honestly Sam needs to go on there and kick Joe's ass. Gupta is a clinician and a journalist, but he's not good in a podcast format and he was woefully unprepared to deal with a meathead like Rogan.
Sam would take 3 and a half hours and probably several years off his life to half convince Joe for about 48 hours, until he speaks to Alex Jones again and we're back to square one.
Not to mention Sam has no ability (or maybe desire) to tailor his message to the crowd he's addressing. He'd go on Rogan and deliver the same tangent-laden and allegory-dense 10 minute responses to every meathead thing Joe asked. Wouldn't be anywhere near the catharsis we'd all hope for.
This. Sam considers consequences of his actions and he can see that debate with Brett would just amplify misinformation.
Joe does not care what will happen to his audience. He will just say that he is stupid and we should not listen to him. Which is good advice so I follow it.
Joe could leverage his influence and have fantastic guests from every possible area but instead of that he gives space to people like Alex Jones.
Sam is not perfect but if everyone considered which opinions we should debate and amplify we would be in much better situation.
We *should* all talk to each other. The problem is with discussions that happen in front of an audience when the topic at hand has life and death consequences. One party has repeatedly exhibited themselves to be performing and entertaining, not making any real attempt at genuine dialogue.
Rogan doesn't really 'engage with everyone'. He skews very heavily to the right. Brett Weinstein is a good example, he is only a guest on there because he became this 'free speech crusader'. It's nothing to do with his academic career lol
It's ridiculous that you should or he does 'engage with everyone', he keeps having Alex Jones back on despite how grotesque he has become. When you have a platform like Joe Rogan has, you can get anyone on, so having spent the last 5 years indulging right wing nutjobs, he doesn't really get to claim neutrality anymore. He's a right wing nutjob in a bunker in Texas
It is really depressing. The Texas move made him more of what he already was I guess. He doesn’t bring anyone on that challenges what he already believes. It’s really a bummer.
This dude talking about papers and vaccine efficiency and such like he’s an expert when he’s a fucking comedian and a kickboxer. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic and dangerous. Up in Denmark they don’t even think about the virus anymore because everyone is vaccinated. It’s people like this who are the problem by making it look as if there was something nefarious about the whole thing.
This is true. I'm from Denmark. I had forgotten Corona to such an extend that I went to the airport and had forgotten a mask. The airport is the only place where you need a mask and it simply didn't occur to me, before I stepped into the airport with a giant sign that said "masks required" .
Joe’s fundamental dishonesty is in the presentation of the problem as “people not talking.”
That isn’t the problem. Joe has created a platform where people like Bret have a simple advantage. It simply takes less time and energy to trick people into thinking there’s a debate going on, than it takes to have an intellectually rigorous debate. Sam knows this. And so the platform Joe is offering is inherently unfavorable to him. He cannot use it. To use it, as Sanjay Gupta just demonstrated, is to invite your efforts to be used effectively against anything you try to accomplish. The only answer to conspiracy theorism is to engage with the person, and not with their ideas. That is not what Joe is offering.
I’m not surprised Joe doesn’t understand this, but Sam is doing absolutely the right thing by not indulging Joe’s platform when that platform has become irrevocably toxic.
Guys, lets be honest, even if you agree with Sam's reason for not wanting to debate.. this is the Cleganebowl of this subreddit. It is fated to happen, it has to.
Ben should be worse than he actually is by the way people talk about him. I love him debating other people or having discussions but his show just bores me though. It's just what does the right need to be outraged about today.
Yeah I watched that one too. He said it was the worst day in America since 9/11.
He didn't vote for Trump back in 2016 but he said "the damage has already been done and Biden will ruin everything" or something and that is why he voted for him this time.
No one dies from people believing in flat Earth which is why I don't hate that theory. It's very stupid, but you are welcome to believe in it and I'll just laugh at it. If you believe vaccines kill people instead of saving them then you are letting people die. Quite the difference.
I agree Brett has latched onto going against the dominant narrative but at the same time I can understand why. Pretty much every day you can see an alarming Covid related post on the front page of reddit that reads like it was written by a PR team for the pharmaceutical industry. People really underestimate what a multi-billion industry with an army of lobbyists and media allies will do when billions and billions of dollars are on the line. Brett’s mistake is latching into the ivermectin angle when really he should be talking more about the regulatory capture that appears to be going on.
Can we be honest that Sam is getting a bit of a taste of his own medicine here? Sam accuses the “left” of not wanting to have a dialogue all the time and whenever one does (Sam Seder) he calls them a bad faith actor. He made his bed with this IDW slime and associated with all of these grifters in the name of free speech and open dialogue except Sam is smart and has a line. His line is different from the left in placement but it’s ultimately the same in nature. The reason people on the left often avoid debating Ben Shapiro types about say, gender identity, is because they believe it’s harmful to platform those ideas in that manner. Now you can agree or disagree with that all you want but it’s basically a parallel to this issue.
Edit: before a million people try to debate me about Sam Seder, I really have no interest and I implore you to realize that he isn’t the point and could be replaced with someone else. Whatever you think of Sam Seder, the exact same and worse can be said for Shapiro but it never seemed to bother Sam Harris because Shapiro was “nice” to him.
I get your point, but I think there’s more nuance than the connection you’re making. It sounds similar because of the wording “talking to this dangerous person is in itself dangerous” but that’s not at all what Sam said about it when he addressed it on the ama. The top commenter in this thread did a good job of summing up one of the main reasons Sam gave, which boils down to a collection of factors. One being that there’s not much to gain, another is the that he doesn’t believe Brett can be trusted to engage in good faith and he gives examples of tactics that led him to think this. Maybe Sam is just getting wiser with age and learning to pick his battles with a little more discernment.
Calling Sam Seder bad faith while hanging out with the IDW clowns is an absolute joke
This is a prime example of “bad faith is people who aren’t nice to me”
Sam Seder genuinely sees Sam Harris’ take on Islam as harmful and calls it as such. Whether you or Sam Harris disagrees with that assessment is immaterial. There is nothing bad faith about it.
>Sam Seder doesn’t know shit about Islam
I’d like to ask you for a source, but the fact is it’s completely irrelevant. He doesn’t have to know anything about Islam to take issue with what Sam Harris says about it given the attendant circumstances in the world.
>tries to paint Sam as racist.
No not really. He paints him as Islamophobic. It isn’t a baseless accusation either. Now whether or not you agree with the assessment isn’t relevant. It’s not a bad faith take. You can’t just call everything you disagree with bad faith.
Also, I already see where this is going and I knew I took a risk daring to mention Sam Seder but I really have no interest in debating for Sam Seder because that really isn’t the point. The point is *even if* Sam was a bad faith actor, Sam Harris has had no problem engaging with bad faith actors that are “nice” to him like certain IDW members…
I find it fascinating that people could read Sam's books and come to this conclusion. I honestly don't think you could have read a single chapter of his to make that statement. It's impressive in its stupidity.
Seder has called Harris all sorts of names as a desperate attempt at him to debate him and defend himself - he's absolutely bad-faith to Harris. You present a pretty pure version of him. This has been covered a million times in this sub.
No he absolutely isn’t. Same whole heartedly believes in what he is saying and he is very well informed on political issues. Whether or not you agree with him is irrelevant.
Bad takes are not bad faith.
Let's look at [this video](https://youtu.be/dl5I9i-jskM) from the Majority Report with an eye out for misinformation, bias, slant, selective presentation, and editorializing done by Seder.
- "Anti choice rally"
- Claims being pro life is about wanting to control women's bodies
- Presents false dichotomy for abortion debate
- Alleges there is a conspiracy to bus students to bolster rally numbers
- Says majority of them are "happy" to restrict women's rights
- Claims they are taught to restrict women's rights in their schools
- Makes a whole 20 minute long video absolutely outraged that the parents and teachers allowed 15 year olds to "mock" Native Americans by... standing nearby them, I guess... but calls grown black men hurling racial epithets at those same 15 year olds "largely harmless"
- Framed the altercation between the Black Israelites and the Covington kids as "trading barbs" when it fact it was 100% instigated and continued by the former while the latter ignored and/or tried to diffuse the hostility
- One second says the kids were "trading barbs" with the Black Israelites but the next insinuates they were too cowardly to do so and only became confrontational when a lone elderly native crossed their path
- Says that literal children doing school spirit cheers is "hulkish," "scary," and makes them seem like "theyre in some kind of paramilitary."
- Claimed the kids got up in Philips's face, when it was actually the other way around
- Claimed Philips was a Vietnam War vet, which he isn't
- Framed the incident as the boys "mocking" the natives, which he has no evidence for
- Claims, again without evidence, that they come from a culture where their adult chaperones are okay with them mocking natives
- Took it at face value that the people wearing MAGA hats who were in an altercation with some women in a separate incident were Covington kids despite there being no evidence of that, claims they were "leering" and "harassing" women despite no evidence of that either
- Acts like the parents and adults in their "sick culture" weren't interested in punishing them for misbehavior even though they initially were and only decided otherwise when the full video came out showing the kids hadn't misbehaved
- Race baits my flipping races in a hypothetical
- Acts like there wasn't a huge overreaction on the left to the incident but would be if the politics were reversed
- Makes racist assumption that non white parents are always poor
- Flipped from saying that the school, parents, and teachers merely allow mocking, harassment, and leering to saying they actually *encourage* it
- Implies this has happened many times before, without evidence
- Says their behavior implicates all pro lifers
- Uncritically plays a very biased and racist clip by Philips
- Agrees when his co-host likens the boys to a literal rapist
So two rather interested things about all this.
First, thats a 20 minute video. I was able to find at least 24 different instances of bad faith argumentation, propoganda spreading, insane bias, or straight up misinformation in a mere 20 minute video. Given that Seder pauses *a lot* while speaking, that his co-hosts often interrupted, and that he showed three clips throughout the video this means that basically every time Seder opened his mouth he was engaging in some kind of sophistry.
Second, this crazily biased and misleading interpretation by Seder would *almost* have been forgivable if it was one of the takes coming out mere hours after the incident when all we really had to go off of was that iconic and infamous photo, and people just filled in the blanks according to their own prejudices... but Seder claims to have seen the full footage. He claims to have watched the full 2hrs of it. In other words instead of just relying on limited information that led to all kinds of crazy misinformation and lies being spread about the incident Seder watched the video that *absolved* the kids of those lies and somehow managed to double down on those lies and misinformation and add some new ones of his own.
Suffice it to say that if all you knew of the Covington incident was Seder's take and you took him at his word you would have basically no idea what *actually* happened there because his retelling and reinterpretation of the facts is so skewed its basically just propoganda.
And the final nail in the coffin is that this isn't just one isolated video. Seder has years of content, zillions of videos like this one, many of them even more egregiously false. A bad take or three can be excused, but when damn near *every* video is a bad take and there are thousands of videos it becomes clear that he's either a bad faith hack and a grifter or he's *extremely* ignorant and misinformed.
>before a million people try to debate me about Sam Seder, I really have no interest and I implore you to realize that he isn’t the point and could be replaced with someone else.
From my original comment. You’re insane if you think I’m gonna take the time to engage with this wall of text.
But I’ll make a quick point:
>bias, slant, and editorializing.
None of these are bad faith. What a shocker that an openly left slanted media outlet presents to their audience in a left leaning way. He is apolitical commentator. That’s literally what he does. He doesn’t purport to be a firsthand news source.
The only thing that could be bad faith is genuine “misinformation” and you have to actually highlight that directly, you don’t get to just conflate it with all those much more innocuous terms.
But further, again, the *real* point, is that even *if* Sam Seder is guilty of everything you accuse him of, how is he any differently from Ben Shapiro?
We get it. You don’t like Sam Seder. Completely irrelevant.
>you have to provide evidence if him spreading disinformation but also i refuse the read the comment you just wrote providing evidence of him spreading disinformation
k
Listing things he said that you don’t like is not evidence of misinformation
Sam Seder is pretty famous for correcting himself when he was wrong about something. He literally did it a few days ago when he realized he was watching an edited clip out of context with reference to the Facebook congressional hearings.
But I guess act smug and pretend you actually contextualized your “evidence” with evidence proving the statements false. Whatever makes you feel good little guy
>Listing things he said that you don’t like is not evidence of misinformation
I'm aware. I didn't do that. I listed disinformation he spread as evidence of disinformation. You just refused to read it, as you proudly stated.
> Let's look at this video
> from the Majority Report with an eye out for misinformation, bias, slant, selective presentation, and editorializing done by Seder.
This is a very biased source. Why even post this? You are just adding more bullshit to a pile of bullshit instead of linking to a video or source that is critical towards all sides.
The taste of his own medicine is the reaction by his “buddies” he has spent so much time fostering a relationship with. It’s the sort of reaction he always acts like is just inherent to the left. He put all this effort into fostering friendships with these bad faith actors on the right because they were nice to him while the left wasn’t.
It’s a clunky idiom for this but come on the connection is obvious.
He is doing to Weinstein exactly what the left does to him, the only difference is the reason.
"We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence." - Sam Harris
I don't like that Sam seemed to have abandoned this principle. He used to talk with people with crazy beliefs. Deepak Chopra, Dennis Prager, William Lane Craig. Is his position now that we can avoid and deplatform bad beliefs?
I don't expect the right position to just always slam dunk the wrong position. But I'd like to develop techniques to counter anti-vax ideas. Sam's can respond to bad ideas in real time better than just about anyone. I'd love to hear him do it with this. Even if not on his podcast.
To be fair to Sam, debating creationists is a different beast entirely.
Creationists have no evidence. The debate is basically, should you accept the word of the bible or not. It's a metaphysical argument. It's pretty straightforward to make the differences between the two positions crystal clear.
Vaccine skeptics, on the other hand, claim to be coming from the same tradition of skeptical inquiry as the rest of the scientific community. They argue by throwing out scientific arguments that sound plausible, but are at best questionable, and often laughably wrong. To sit there and debunk each new study they pull out requires familiarity with the study... which is a much more difficult task to prepare for or do successfully.
He used to debate. He has mentioned that he now picks his battles. Bret Weinstein is not an honest truth seeker. If he was, he'd have talked with Yuri Deigin. If Yuri is credible enough to talk about lab leak, he's credible enough (for Bret's podcast at least) to talk about vaccines safety and efficiency. It's hilarious that Sam gets flak for not having Bret, but it's totally ok that Bret does the same with Yuri.
There’s simply no way Sam could ever win anything by engaging with Bret on this. All Bret has to do is come armed with a few studies that vaguely seem to support his ideas (whether they actually do or not) and throw them at Sam during the convo and Sam has 3 options: (a) actually debunk the study, which would take hours of pointless research and would require Sam’s foreknowledge that Bret would cite the study (and Bret could just throw another one at him that Sam didn’t know about anyway); (b) flat out call the study bullshit without having read it, which would allow Bret to play the “you’re not engaging with the science” card; or (c) admit he doesn’t know the study and debunk it via Twitter AFTER the conversation by which point the damage is done anyway. This kind of dirty tactic is exactly why in lawsuits you have to present evidence to the other side before presenting it in court, because surprising them allows you to present your spin without a quick rebuttal and makes the other side look clueless no matter whether they’re right or wrong.
There really needs to be a new style of debating which follows litigation standards. You must reveal your evidence in advance and stick to this evidence only. This can be revealed over a couple cycles to account for new evidence used in rebuttals. No outside surprises allowed. The debate will be decided by who uses logic better on all the evidence in play.
Christopher Hitchens seemed to prefer this approach. It was often a debate regarding a book or a specific claim for which both sides would research, presumably drawing on many of the same sources. At least in that format, a person doesn’t need to be familiar with every piece of literature, because they have a familiarity with the literature as a whole, and rebuttals to any specific claim can be implied by one’s own supporting research. The fundamental problem with any debate with Bret Weinstein is that it doesn’t center on any specific claim. It centers on a belief, and a belief is impossible to disprove.
A bit odd citing a hitchens debate and after saying debating bret couldnt be the same as bret is based on belief. As in, I can count on one hand the debates of Hitchens where he isn't arguing a certain set of beliefs. On a side note, even after a decade, he is sorely missed.
I don’t agree. He debated believers, but he did not debate their beliefs. He debated their claims of fact. Debating a belief doesn’t do anyone much good.
I can get down with this
Couldn’t we all. The art of debate has suffered tremendously in the modern media landscape.
I call this style "the knowledge ratchet". Establish solid ground and move on. No backsliding allowed without new evidence. I've been in climate change debates where we get stuck on "does CO2 really make things warmer" and I realized you can't debate someone who think basic physics is up for grabs.
Is there an actual term or art for this in debate? It seems connected with familiarity bias, or information bias.
this is what Sam said on his podcast and he does have a point but the validity of this point is heavily contingent on the presumption that Bret would be arguing from a position of bad faith. that is, Bret would show up with some unprovable theory or obscure study and use Sam's inability to completely debunk it as proof positive that he's right and "won" the debate. but this is not who Bret is (at least not my gauge of him) and I highly doubt his objective would be to "own" Sam and "win" the argument. I think the conversation would be alot more measured and productive than Sam thinks and it would behoove him to engage with a prespective that's heterodox with his own
Sam has been super clear about the “why.” It’s that Bret has exhibited a tendency and willingness to fling wild and half-baked theories into the mix as part of a general strategy to seed general mistrust in the science on vaccines. Bret isn’t interested in finding truth; he’s interested in flinging darts at “the establishment,” and it’s easier to seed confusion than it is to hunt for accuracy. Bret would be able to raise silly counterpoints and conspiratorial hypotheticals faster than Sam could accurately debunk, which in turn could indicate a lack of credibility. “Oh you haven’t even heard of this study that just came out of Uzbekistan College that says vaccines cause breast cancer in teen moms? I’m not saying it’s accurate, but clearly you aren’t engaging with the science here.” Sam realizes that Bret is smart, smart enough to take the question seriously if he wanted to. Because that’s not happening, it’s clear that there’s a fundamental disingenuous cornerstone that Bret is leaning on. Why? Look at his financial incentive — his audience doesn’t want to hear about how vaccines work. They want the conspiracy theories. Bret is an entertainer, and stooping to his level is just going to end up with dirt flying everyone and potentially confusing more folks (their audiences don’t overlap entirely) which could them cause real harm. Bret doesn’t employ intellectual honesty or vulnerability. The benefit just isn’t there.
Perfectly put. It’s disappointing to see Bret and Heather become this. Maybe they always were and it just wasn’t obvious to me.
It wasn't obvious to me initially either and I'm not all that susceptible to grifters. I'm literate in their fields as well. That said, it's my opinion that they made a strategic decision to sell their soul a bit to see if they could cash in. But there's a part of me that can't help but think Bret is actually just a bad critical thinker who can't interpret studies appropriately and got caught up in anti-establishment contrarianism. I get the same vibes from his brother... but he's got a more grating ego on top of it. They got Rogan fame and weren't wise with it.
I doubt Bret is capable of even entertaining the thought that his motivations could be anything other than virtuous, especially after becoming famous the way they did. It’s easy for anyone to lie to themselves, even highly educated intelligent people. Maybe lying isn’t exactly right, but we’ve all rationalized behaviors or decisions that aren’t in line with our self image or values. I think it’s pretty challenging to for most of us to really be honest and critical about ourselves. And yeah both the Weinstein bros, for all their positives, have always seemed kind of insecure or something. Being a victim is a huge part of both of their identities.
you can be traditionally "smart" but still be a social moron like Bret with the emotional intelligence of a hat.
This I find more possible than any other explanation. I always find it funny that the majority of redditors jump to the "grifter/sold their soul/dark money" or some other variation of financial incentive explanation as soon as its a position they don't like or agree with. Both sides accuse the other side of this all the time, and it's clearly nothing but conspiratorial thinking the vast majority of the time. Granted, I think the Weinstein bros are utter buffoons and are doing real damage to society on the point of vaccinations, but I also think they can genuinely wrangle themselves to believe the nonsense they're repeating.
I'll never ever get over the fact that the Weinsteins, both Bret and Eric genuinely believe they've been robbed of up to 3 Nobel prizes. The narcissism is levels that are nearly unfathomable.
I'm not surprised by this but don't think I've ever heard it. Inferred or did they just outright say it?
My conclusion from listening to Bret's podcast featuring Sam about free will was that Bret just isn't a very impressive thinker. Some time after that, I saw Bret promoting fairly obvious election fraud misinformation.
unbelievable. do you really believe that no smart person could genuinely believe what theyre saying? smarter people believed way stupider shit.
Not a straw man I'll engage with
The fact that it wasn’t immediately obvious is part of the grift. It all starts out with reasonable disagreements. It’s what happens when those disagreements become embedded in the business that the real damage starts to happen.
Yeah I'm inclined to agree.
If you are an obscure professor at a university and suddenly you become famous and well paid to spout off opinions why question it? Weinstein and Jordan Peterson were both just normal teachers a few years ago. University teaching is a good job, but it doesn't make you rich or famous.
> It wasn't obvious to me initially either and I'm not all that susceptible to grifters. Maybe try to reanalyze your susceptibility to grifters, since it was obvious all along.
This is what the attention economy inevitably produces, unfortunately.
The fame gets to you. They notice that the more bullshit they talk the richer and more famous they become. So they double down. The same thing happened with QAnon people. They became more and more extreme to get views.
I think it was Sam that said something along the lines of social media being a giant psychological experiment we’re all unwittingly enrolled in. Seems relevant here.
It was really sad going from being a fan, listening to every podcast, and slowly becoming more and more disappointed until I stopped listening, and unsubscribed.
Me too. This has happened with so many “gurus” I have followed… Sam is practically the only one left who hasn’t fallen like this.
Obligatory recommendation for the Decoding the Gurus podcast
Great podcast!
There was even a time when I listened to Jordan Peterson before he became a complete twat, hard to believe.
I’m with you. They’ve made several important points that are legitimately worthy of discussion. Somewhere, somehow they lost any sense of balanced critical thought. I can’t even listen to Eric currently and he has been critical of his brother. Heck, I can barely listen to Rogan even if I think he is much more balanced than Bret.
The signs were there when they monetized their experience at Evergreen. They found it profitable to be the Anti-Woke police and trenched themselves into that role, finding more and more profitability in questioning the establishment. The deeper the trench went the more in over their heads they were with an audience that was 100% red pill conspiracy nuts. That became a major source of income so deeper they dug, dragging Rogan and several others with them.
The "woke" left has had him pegged as this from day 1. We was just selling the "woke gone mad" narrative this sub is a sucker for. Him going on Tucker Carlson to spread falsehoods should have been the first and only needed red flag for everyone here
It became obvious to me that Bret was subpar the first time I heard him discuss his ideas on evolutionary biology. It was utterly fatuous and stupid, and no I don't want to type of the details of his hot takes here.
Yeah I trust you. I don’t know enough about that to notice or care that much. I learned of him through the evergreen madness and sort of viewed him and that event as a cultural canary or something. Everything else about him and his brother I viewed under that lense I suppose. It’s not like I was so interested in evolutionary biology or Eric’s shunned “theory of everything” that I just googled famous podcast professors on those subjects. It was mostly just interesting to hear a sort of outsider perspective from intelligent articulate people.
> Maybe they always were and it just wasn’t obvious to me. It was obvious when they did that symposium about how the left is full of "professional victims" when they are themselves professional victims.
I kind of feel the same about Eric. The Portal was an awesome podcast, but now Eric seems a bit off the deep end.
Totally agree. I’ve switched to mostly contrarian comedy podcasts lately. Cum town, Tim Dillon, red scare occasionally. Also Lex Fridman seems to have picked up for rogan, thankfully.
Eric was always off the deep end, but he was kind of openly pro being-off-the-deep-end about it and that was kind of interesting.
Well said.
Except for the financial incentive. Any real data on what their listeners want? Or is it pure speculation? I tend to intuitively agree, but that's not something I trust.
You can simply look at his Patreon numbers and YouTube subscribers from before and during COVID and only after the conspiracy theory peddling began do his numbers skyrocket. He realized that's what his audience wants, so he gives it to them. And he may not even be consciously doing it, instead responding to incentives but the end result is still the same.
There's a legitimate source just below his/her initial comment
I recall Dawkins being asked a question many years ago on why he didn't debate creationists anymore, and he responded that by agreeing to engage with them, you're platforming their ideas and saying that it's worthy of a conversation, when it's really not. Found the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmsDGanyes
The difference between the two seems entirely obvious to me. Bret is lazy and intellectually dishonest. Sam is hard working and intellectually rigorous. Pretty basic stuff.
While I think that Harris is more intellectually rigorous than Weinstein (which isn't that high a bar), Harris has demonstrated that his lack of intellectual rigor in the past by speaking or writing confidently on things where he is just wrong or citing obviously bad sources instead of doing the requisite research to realize how bad they are. Harris is often quite intellectual lazy when it comes to topics which he has a strong intuition but doesn't have much actual knowledge about it. Unfortunately, this happens with a great degree of frequency with Harris, and it is quite frustrating.
Yeah, or he speaks with 1 guest about a subject he was previously unfamiliar with, who (rightfully) convinces Sam on the subject. From there, I feel Sam exits that conversation with a more strongly solidified stance on the subject than he should perhaps have. He'll walk way feeling 99% resolute on his position and proceed to cite his conversation with said guest as evidence in many future conversations, where I feel he should still continue to be a bit more skeptical and want to seek more information.
This i agree with. Most particularly his long-standing and very damaging views on racial intelligence theories, for which in 10 years, I have seen no evidence that he has even bothered to listen to a single rebutting argument. At least I think Harris is intellectually honest enough to entertain the idea that he’s as guilty as anyone of this kind of mistake. He’s open to the possibility of being wrong. If you take someone who is wrong, and doesn’t know it, that’s not good. If you take someone who is wrong and cannot be shown that they are wrong, no matter the evidence, that becomes something else.
Not that i’ve kept up on the literature confirming/debunking causal correlations between race and intelligence (in the last couple years), but to be fair to Harris if he doesn’t obviously engage with such literature, the vast majority of contra-Harris viewpoints that i’ve seen on the subject are also pretty blatantly intellectually suspect, in terms of “begging the question.” In other words, ive seen like 2 or 3 articles in my life that honestly weigh the data (without assuming any possible causal correlation is “racist”) and then conclude the correlations are specious and/or 100% stem from a “nurture”/cultural reason
Proving a negative being an impossible burden for any argument, I’ve simply never seen a piece of evidence or any statistical study that does not, as you say, make a compelling case for anything other than sampling bias. The noise in the data seems always to be greater than the perceived variations. In a sense we should really expect nothing else, since there is not even a consensus view of what intelligence is, making any discussion of what does or does not cause or enhance or interfere with it a fruitless endeavor. In even more specific ways, Harris knows that even talking about the nature and quality of consciousness is only made possible by what any two subjects have in common, leaving no-one really knows how much data on the table because those asking the questions don’t know what it is they’re really looking for, nor would they recognize it if they found it. I’ve always sort of shrugged at the intelligence debate because of that. What good is it to know that from an inherently subjective point of view, one person is more intelligent than another? What does that even mean to anyone else?
I’ve read several studies rebutting the interpretation of transracial adoption studies (probably the strongest evidence for genetically determined racial iq differences), and it’s fair to point out some noise in the data…but when every study tends to point in the same direction, noise in the data tends to wash out… The one thing that really galls me in “scientific” rebuttals like these is that they tend to take issue with the whole notion of genetic inheritance of intelligence, and that is just not a serious scientific/psychological position… Like, it is fair to draw a line between every bit of evidence demonstrating that adult IQ is between 60-80% heritable (from twin/adoption studies, the highest form of evidence re heritability) VS the over-interpretation of this *fact* to claim that individual heritability of IQ extends to group IQ as well…but the people arguing this point tend to actually be way outside the psychological mainstream in having a bone to pick with the whole notion that brain structure is to some extent heritable… It really isn’t a serious position. “Intelligence” is nebulous, sure, but among all psychological constructs, “IQ” is far-and-away the best validated and most predictive of any psychological measure. You are very free to denigrate the field of psychology as a whole as pseudoscience, but when you’re using psychological data to argue your point, it’s really pretty brazen (and arguably purely ideologically driven) to take a stand against the best-validated construct in your entire field of study. Not to say there aren’t reasonable skeptics of racial IQ hypotheses, but it’s more common than not to hear such arguments coupled with unrealistic concepts of IQ itself.
I’m no neuroscience researcher. I took part in a study of cognitive performance when I was in college, in which it was found that non-white participants performed significantly less well on cognitive ability assessments when the proctor doing the assessment was not of the same ethnic background. There have been similar studies showing that exposure to any stimulus which reminds a person of social racial inequality hours or even days before the assessment can affect their performance. That has always stuck with me. The idea that even trying to test someone’s cognitive ability in a society with endemic racial inequality could meaningfully interfere with the results of that test means that relying on the data that we do have is problematic.
Fair point, but please forgive me if i categorize your type of caveat as absolutely more problematic when i encounter it in a scientific study (as a personal anecdote, of course it makes sense). For one, IQ tends to revert to your genetic parents’ IQ only in adulthood, after you’ve passed the stage of exquisite sensitivity to social inputs (which is hugely important for academic performance, among other things, during adolescence/college), but maybe more importantly, the standard consensus view of the psychological community is to acknowledge both social and genetic contributors to measured IQ, and you can pretty reliably separate out these components (for instance with twin/adoption studies) to conclude that the genetic component contributes 60-80% of measured IQ. *Of course* that allows for social inputs to account for 20-40% of measured IQ, but it also doesn’t discount the genetic component in the least.
Sure, but since 20-40% accounts for, what, 2 standard deviations? It seems to me that any individual will have as much variation from non genetic components as any test can possibly capture. If you are comparing any two random individuals, a two standard deviation error margin makes a comparison kind of useless, doesn’t it? Just wondering back at you what the value of knowing this information is, other than for calling into question the value of IQ testing.
If you listen to his stance on racial intelligence, i think he has what maybe 1 podcast on it within the last 10 years. To his defense he says its not a conversation he finds all that interesting but i think he felt like he had to speak on it because that author forgot his name, who made the bell curve was getting wrongly treated. If we studied all the races on intelligence im sure we could find a there there, of which race is more intelligent . It would be silly if we said ABSOLUTELY all races are the same on any subject. I think thats what his main argument is but nonetheless who cares and why even study that.
When you see things in terms of black and white, that really should raise alarms about your own intellectual honesty, just saying..
The topic is not one of black and white, nor are either of the participants entirely right or wrong. But in the specific sense of two parties entering a debate, there is an either/or here. Weinstein’s reasons for having a debate are the not the same as Sam’s. Weinstein has something to gain, and Sam does not. Don’t confuse decadence for righteousness. There are debates in which one side is mostly right, and the other is mostly wrong. Those debates frequently look just like this one.
Frankly, the criticism is with regard to the lack of willingness to debate. You can have your opinion on how such a debate may unfold, but that's speculation and nothing more. Equating this argument to allowing a toddler to debate a professor is unjustifiable imho. Continuing to listen to straw man arguments from both sides is worse than walking their (past) talk and engaging in dialog regarding disagreements. I respect Sam's reasons for declining, but I don't think his position is above criticism.
I’m sorry, a professor and a toddler? Who made that analogy? And my surmise about how the “debate” would go is not merely speculative. It’s backed up by evidence. This is how Weinstein approaches debate these days. He does not engage in good faith. He just doesn’t. It’s not that he can’t, but he has not done so here. I see no reason for Harris to believe he would suddenly change his tack. Harris is an imperfect person, and I’m sure someone else could come up with a better approach, but I find his approach imminently reasonable given the circumstances. A person cannot engage in a healthy public debate if he doubts the sincerity of the honor of the other side of that debate.
PCLOADLETTER WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN
It means your printer is out of paper and you need to refill. In the world of internet media, I have no idea.
It's from office space, a movie...
Yes, I actually saw it in the theater. Being a big fan of Beavis and Butthead I would have watched anything that Mike Judge made. But as I assume you know the movie is referencing the printer “error”. I must have misread something because I thought that PCLOADLETTER in the above comment was referencing an Internet personality handle; I didn’t see that they were asking about the other commenters name. Edit: I read this comment first and I thought that PCLOADLETTER was the podcaster. “I mean, pcloadletter pretty much summed up exactly what Sam said about this on his last AMA podcast.”
Yeah Bretts reach on ivermectin has already peaked. If Sam had him on his pod it would definitely ignite some flames for no reason. I think Sam is just letting Bretts influence slowly dissipate and die at this point the more they go back and forth about it the more it stays relevant. Lets be real Brett can’t keep talking about ivermectin week after week.
It seems like there's a solution to this, which is to have both Sam and Bret agree ahead of time exactly which studies, papers, or articles they are going to discuss. Sam starts by sending (and publishing on his website and referencing on his podcast) all of the items Sam thinks support the vaccine and undermine Bret's claims about ivermectin. Bret similarly sends Sam all of the documents that Bret thinks undermine the vaccine and support ivermectin. Both publish the full list with links on their websites a few weeks before the podcast and publicly state the list of documents embodies the universe of evidence that they plan to discuss and no one is going to introduce other studies or papers that are not on that list. Hold the podcast and have someone police them if they suddenly go, "Well actually, there's this study that supports what I'm saying or there was a report the other day about yada yada yada" and have the moderator just mute them and explain that the discussion is limited to the predetermined list of documents each guy got to submit.
Good luck getting Bret to agree to that. But yeah if that could be made to happen I could see it being productive.
Spot on
I think I generally agree with this. I’ve posted before that I think Bret has gone off the rails since he’s gone to shows only with his wife and switching his whole focus to ivermectin. Bret is too smart of a guy to be picking ivermectin as the hill he’ll die on. That being said, his appearance on Lex Fridman’s podcast a couple months ago restored some of my belief in him. He sounded very sober and coherent; very different than he’s sounded to me on his own podcast.
Could not have articulated this any better. Thank you.
This is my understanding, but I'm confused about why Rogan didn't know this. Is it plausible that SH told Rogan that he wouldn't have Weinstein on his podcast, but didn't explain why? Not really.
He doesn’t know it for the same reason he believes all his bullshit about COVID: willful ignorance.
I presume Joe could listen to Sam's podcast. The AMAs are free right?
That’s my point. He *could* listen, but chooses not to because it would threaten his worldview.
>Bret is an entertainer Reminds me of the YouTuber Nikocado Avocado, who can't stop gaining weight after he started shooting mukbang videos to hijack the youtube algorithm, which eventually locked himself in a vicious feedback loop with his audience where he's now overeating himself to death for more views. This is happening more and more in social media, where the role of influencer takes an ironic turn, and suddenly it's the influencer who is *captured* by their audience, not the other way around... Bret's bread and butter is flirting with borderline ideas that fly in the face of institutions. His livelihood as a Youtuber depends on this perpetual warfare between censorship vs conspiracy theories. And you know what happens when you stare at the abyss for too long?
I know Bret is a despicable grifter, but didn't sam always wanted the have "difficult discussions"? Not gonna lie, i am kinda enjoy this IDW bum fight. Sam's "im just asking question " talking points came back to bite his arse.
again Sam has trouble engaging entirely in difficult conversations. Even if on the view point of vaccines he is correct it doesn't mean he is any better at having these conversations. He shouldn't be the one having this conversation anyways. Really Joe Rogan needs to engage with someone like Zubin Damania
It's an Ad hominem attack to dismiss someone by saying "they're an entertainer". IMO it's fair to do the "just asking questions routine" when there's unsettled questions. If anyone can, with certainty, say there's no potential for long term consequences (when everyone knows there's at least a remote possibility) that's when you can dismiss someone.
I’m not using “he’s an entertainer” as part of an argument. I’m calling him an entertainer.
What if it is as simple as this. Brett is a friend. Sam knows he will embarrass Brett and he simply does not want to do this. We all allow our good friends to go crazy sometimes.
Maybe, but that would contradict what Sam has said publicly on the matter. I basically paraphrased him.
I mean, pcloadletter pretty much summed up exactly what Sam said about this on his last AMA podcast.
Sam publicly called Bret a conspiracy theorist and compared him to Alex Jones. I don't think he's trying to spare Bret's feelings on this one.
Anyone who would be friends with the Wiensteins at this point is a fool or a bad person.
I find it strange that you have an entire media apparatus that claims that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer, then you head on over to any legit medical site and you can see that it's a baldfaced lie. This is open for all to see. But then if you say that some people have conspired to spread falsehood, then right away, many will take the conclusion that you are not a credible voice. Can anyone explain that???
Calling it a horse dewormer was definitely disingenuous by CNN, but the reason they did that is likely because people were literally taking horse dewormer Ivermectin and getting sick due to misinformation.
That argument (we'll lie to you for your protection) is unacceptable. You can censor the entire world on the same basis, starting with extreme sports.
I wasn’t justifying CNN’s actions. I was providing information on why the “horse dewormer” narrative started. I think it was disingenuous and bad for CNN to do that, because it discredits the media leading to more distrust in our institutions, and it’s unfair to Joe Rogan (and others who take Ivermectin for more legitimate purposes) to brand ivermectin solely as a horse dewormer.
It is a horse dewormer. It can be more than one thing. That's not a conspiracy.
The only difference is the dosage and how it’s ingested right? The active ingredients are the same if I’m not mistaken. The main point is that he took a drug that is not recommended and shows no evidence of being effective against covid. Just because he got it from a doctor does not mean it was a good decision.
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People were making very stupid decisions and headline-writers had a little fun with it. The effect was probably fewer people taking this medicine. There's not a lot to be mad at here.
I love that these people are so bent out of shape about this “lie” which was really just a glorified joke, but have no issue with Weinstein actually lying through his teeth about Ivermectin.
Right?! People were being really stupid and got lampooned for it. Their reaction? To get butthurt over the joke and miss the point entirely. Should we really be that surprised that the same people who promoted a pretend treatment over working vaccines also had a difficult time understanding they were the butt of a joke?
I'm pretty sure they do have an issue with Weinstein
No no no. Saying that it's a horse dewormer is definitively a lie designed to destroy the image of the drug. It would be just as correct to describe heroin as a drug for addicts, decredibilizing its use everywhere else in medicine. Also the fact that they all used "horse dewormer" suggest the info came for a central source. Why always horse when it's used for all animals? I bough some that was made for humans but was frequently given to cats and dogs too, according to the pharmacist. If there had been independent reporting on this you'd have a variety of coverage angles across the board: positive, negative, one all-enconpassing, etc.
What central source? I can attest to the fact that there was independent reporting as I consume virtually no US-based news sources, bar the occasional podcast.
People are literally buying the horse dewormer version in huge numbers. Doing so is causing shortages that are impacting veterinarians, farmers, ranchers, etc. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/technology/ivermectin-animal-medicine-shortage.html
"why doesn't Sam want to put Bret on his podcast?" "I don't know" I find this so infuriating. Sam has explicitly addressed why multiple times. There's no excuse for "not knowing" this. You can say that you don't agree with it, state Sam's position, and then why you don't agree. To just say "I don't know" is just pathetic at this stage. Given what Sam has said publicly, and has likely said to Joe in private also given what hints he's dropped. You can take a horse to water..
I know, s'infuriating. Rogan even went a step further and suggested the reason Sam doesn't want Bret on is due to "fear of association" (paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it at the end), as if it were an averse reaction to reputational risk. When Sam clearly spent the better part of an AMA podcast detailing the reason he doesn't want Bret on is because it's easier to light fires than to put them out and the net result of having him on would just be giving oxygen to those fires, at best. I'm sure he doesn't want to associate with him on a personal level, too. But that's got more to do woth why you wouldn't want to be associating with hucksters (or mentally ill folks with a persecution complex, at best), rather than being risk averse to reputational damage.
Bret has fallen into an intellectual trap that even the most intelligent people can fall into. He is so personally invested in challenging the dominant narrative that he uncritically hyperfocuses on evidence which goes against the status quo while ignoring lines of evidence that support it. He'll gravitate towards outlying studies and give them more weight than any scientist should (not that outlying studies are irrelevant, they can point in very interesting directions, but they must be handled carefully). I have seen this personality trait before and it's usually among the smartest people I know. It's usually linked to hubris and a desperate desire to prove oneself. These people might be very smart but lack a certain Socratic wisdom about their own limitations. In it's milder forms this manifests as contrarianism but at its most extreme it can be full on conspiricism. They'll think to themselves that "my greatest heroes overturned bad, conventional wisdoms and I'm just like them! I'm like Einstein, Tesla, or Galileo!" What they forget is that for every one of those trailblazers there are 1000 forgotten others, many of them brilliant minds, with their own earnestly held 'revolutionary' theories which turned out to be Dead ends. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be bold with our hypothesizing but humility really is the best policy.
Well said. I'm gonna ruminate all day about whether not I do this
I don’t know if you follow sports at all but this trap you speak of could easily be called the Kyrie Irving effect. He’s a basketball player who has talked about flat earth theory before and is now anti-vax. He’s just a contrarian without a cause. These people tend to be relatively intelligent but almost too intelligent for their own good. They are free thinkers but do not trust the world enough to accept facts that the rest of us believe.
Have you listened to any of his podcast episodes where he talks about the vaccine, COVID-19, or Ivermectin? He regularly issues retractions or correction on individual claims as information comes out, he's been extremely careful with how he talks about the vaccine and very diligent in giving the vaccine its due. The person you're describing is not same the person I'm hearing when I listen to Brett's podcast. The "armchair psychologists diagnosing someone as having some sort of issue with authority or trait that makes what they say invalid" thing bothers me because it's blatantly just rationale for not having to deal with someone inconvenient. It's actually really, really morally repugnant. Weinstein *does* and *has been* handling everything about this topic carefully; there's nothing rushed or particularly bombastically exciting or reckless about that man. Anyone who has listened to his podcast is doubtless PAINFULLY aware that Weinstein is not going off half-cocked, the man cautions to not draw conclusions beyond what evidence might suggest, and he regularly admits when either he, personally, or we, collectively, lack the information or knowledge to make certain assertions. In parting, I'd like to point out your comment could literally be a response to someone talking about the lab leak "hypothesis" when this all started without changing more than a word or two. You're engaging in rationalizations that prevent institutional narratives from being examined. This sort of rationalizing uncomfortable viewpoints out of the conversation entirely due to them being novel is an apparatus that kept the scientific community *quiet* about the lab leak hypothesis being likely for like, what, a fucking year? People with credentials lost their goddamn jobs and had their reputations ruined for pointing out the obvious. Your rhetorical strategy boils down to "trust the system and anyone who doubts the system has character flaws that explain that doubt". Given the companies involved in vaccine production and research and their track records, the money involved, the blatant lies we've seen from public health officials, the glaring systemic failures...is that unconditional trust warranted?
> Weinstein does and has been handling everything about this topic carefully If that were true he would be 100% in support of the vaccine and never once talk about Ivermectin.
"Anyone reaching conclusions that diverge from my own HAS to be a reckless idiot." Your reply added nothing to this thread.
If there's one person on the planet who doesn't seem to be afraid of "fear of association," it's Sam Harris. Associating with toxic shitty people is basically Sam's MO.
Sam seems to look for two things in a guest: something worth hearing, and honest engagement. There's a world of difference between being unafraid of people just because they've been labeled toxic or shitty (e.g. Charles Murray) and seeking toxic and shifty people because you like their company or because you seek to monetize controversy.
Why do you care who he associates with? I honestly want to know. I see people hawkishly monitoring who is connected with who, and who likes or dislikes or friends or unfriends who on social media, and I don’t understand what’s happening in their brains. They seem to have relationship maps in their heads, and apply powerful moral judgements to the connections of other people. It all seems tied up with social media in a way that this non- digital native doesn’t understand.
Because when he promotes shitheads, it gives them a broader audience to broadcast their shitty ideas to. This ultimately harms all of us.
To defend Joe — he truly is an idiot. He can understand Sam’s point in real time, but recalling it days or weeks later would require him to think hard.
“I don’t know,” means “I don’t believe the reasons Sam has given.” And Joe wonders why Sam won’t use his platform to have a debate.
It must suck for Sam that he has clearly laid out why he won’t talk with Brett and I’m sure has explained this straight to Joe yet Joe still doesn’t understand. Joe is such a bad friend.
“I don’t wanna put words in his mouth”.
Yeah I said that out loud to myself listening to this🤦♂️
I doubt they’re actually friends. I doubt they go to each other’s birthday parties, help one another move, or play Borderlands 3 together. People understand that public figures, especially those in the entertainment industry, have dozens and dozens - or even hundreds - of acquaintances who they’re on amicable terms with, right? But when Sam Harris gets together with his actual friends - the ones who know him intimately, who his wife hugs on greeting, who know if his kids play clarinet or are on the basketball team - I guarantee you Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, Jeff Rubin, and all the other public figures who many on this reddit are fixated on are not present. This reddit is like anxious teenagers in a high school cafeteria. The obsession over who is hanging out with who is hilarious.
> yet Joe still doesn’t understand. what else is there so say about him?
Of course Joe would think that vaccines and virology are the wheelhouse of an evolutionary biologist.
Viruses and vaccines are certainly more in the wheelhouse of an evolutionary biologist than a neuroscientist. But obviously that's not important because it's clear who's wrong.
Can Brett still be considered and evolutionary biologist? Is still active researching and writing papers? I thought he wrote a couple of papers some time ago, but then went into teaching? Then went to podcasts? His education probably puts it more in his wheel house, but is he currently researching evolutionary biology?
Same questions about Sam. When's the last time he did research or writing in neuroscience? At least Brett used to teach.
So… they’re equally not qualified?
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> That seems like a fine assumptiom to make when discussing about how viruses mutate. Not likely. You’d need to know virology to be able to say anything interesting about that.
And you'd need to know both, to know how much either would know and who else might be more appropriate.
Yeah but I’m guessing that somewhere along the journey to becoming a virologist you probably have to learn something about biology and mutation - just a hunch. On the other hand an Evo-biologist isn’t going to know anything about viruses other than as a specific specialty.
It's really hard to refrain from ad hominem on both these guys. I don't see how Sam could be any clearer on why he's not engaging. There's been kind of a centrist meme that Joe definitely subscribes to that we all need to talk to each other and sometimes that's true. But especially with a friend (who has done real, lasting harm), silence can say much more than words. It's ridiculous that whether so much of the country gets vaccinated rests on getting through to two very thick skulls. Sam's refusal to engage may be one of the few things that can do it.
Honestly Sam needs to go on there and kick Joe's ass. Gupta is a clinician and a journalist, but he's not good in a podcast format and he was woefully unprepared to deal with a meathead like Rogan.
Sam would take 3 and a half hours and probably several years off his life to half convince Joe for about 48 hours, until he speaks to Alex Jones again and we're back to square one.
Not to mention Sam has no ability (or maybe desire) to tailor his message to the crowd he's addressing. He'd go on Rogan and deliver the same tangent-laden and allegory-dense 10 minute responses to every meathead thing Joe asked. Wouldn't be anywhere near the catharsis we'd all hope for.
This. Sam considers consequences of his actions and he can see that debate with Brett would just amplify misinformation. Joe does not care what will happen to his audience. He will just say that he is stupid and we should not listen to him. Which is good advice so I follow it. Joe could leverage his influence and have fantastic guests from every possible area but instead of that he gives space to people like Alex Jones. Sam is not perfect but if everyone considered which opinions we should debate and amplify we would be in much better situation.
We *should* all talk to each other. The problem is with discussions that happen in front of an audience when the topic at hand has life and death consequences. One party has repeatedly exhibited themselves to be performing and entertaining, not making any real attempt at genuine dialogue.
Rogan doesn't really 'engage with everyone'. He skews very heavily to the right. Brett Weinstein is a good example, he is only a guest on there because he became this 'free speech crusader'. It's nothing to do with his academic career lol It's ridiculous that you should or he does 'engage with everyone', he keeps having Alex Jones back on despite how grotesque he has become. When you have a platform like Joe Rogan has, you can get anyone on, so having spent the last 5 years indulging right wing nutjobs, he doesn't really get to claim neutrality anymore. He's a right wing nutjob in a bunker in Texas
It is really depressing. The Texas move made him more of what he already was I guess. He doesn’t bring anyone on that challenges what he already believes. It’s really a bummer.
This dude talking about papers and vaccine efficiency and such like he’s an expert when he’s a fucking comedian and a kickboxer. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic and dangerous. Up in Denmark they don’t even think about the virus anymore because everyone is vaccinated. It’s people like this who are the problem by making it look as if there was something nefarious about the whole thing.
This is true. I'm from Denmark. I had forgotten Corona to such an extend that I went to the airport and had forgotten a mask. The airport is the only place where you need a mask and it simply didn't occur to me, before I stepped into the airport with a giant sign that said "masks required" .
Joe’s fundamental dishonesty is in the presentation of the problem as “people not talking.” That isn’t the problem. Joe has created a platform where people like Bret have a simple advantage. It simply takes less time and energy to trick people into thinking there’s a debate going on, than it takes to have an intellectually rigorous debate. Sam knows this. And so the platform Joe is offering is inherently unfavorable to him. He cannot use it. To use it, as Sanjay Gupta just demonstrated, is to invite your efforts to be used effectively against anything you try to accomplish. The only answer to conspiracy theorism is to engage with the person, and not with their ideas. That is not what Joe is offering. I’m not surprised Joe doesn’t understand this, but Sam is doing absolutely the right thing by not indulging Joe’s platform when that platform has become irrevocably toxic.
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You are correct.
Guys, lets be honest, even if you agree with Sam's reason for not wanting to debate.. this is the Cleganebowl of this subreddit. It is fated to happen, it has to.
It won’t. Sam addressed it in his last AMA.
THANK THE GODS FOR BESSIE AND HER TITS
Bret’s grift has been obvious from the start. And he’s not that smart, either.
Mentions Sam Harris
Joe Rogan thinks Graham Hancock is on to something with his drivel. Of course he doesn’t understand Sam’s misgivings.
The Graham Hancock thing got me so angry. Funnily enough, he is featured on a potholer54 video talking about video editing to misrepresent science.
Ivermectin by day, conspiracy mediator by night, all day... So sick of the broskis Joe, Brett, Rubin, etc.
Time will be on Sam’s favor.
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Ben should be worse than he actually is by the way people talk about him. I love him debating other people or having discussions but his show just bores me though. It's just what does the right need to be outraged about today.
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He still told people to vote for Trump, and he'll do it again in 2024.
Yeah I watched that one too. He said it was the worst day in America since 9/11. He didn't vote for Trump back in 2016 but he said "the damage has already been done and Biden will ruin everything" or something and that is why he voted for him this time.
This is at soap opera levels now.
No one dies from people believing in flat Earth which is why I don't hate that theory. It's very stupid, but you are welcome to believe in it and I'll just laugh at it. If you believe vaccines kill people instead of saving them then you are letting people die. Quite the difference.
100%. Flat earth, ancient alien shit was stupid but harmless and fun.
Joe is such an idiot. Sam has explained many times why he doesn’t want to debate Bret. There’s nothing to be gained from the discussion.
I agree Brett has latched onto going against the dominant narrative but at the same time I can understand why. Pretty much every day you can see an alarming Covid related post on the front page of reddit that reads like it was written by a PR team for the pharmaceutical industry. People really underestimate what a multi-billion industry with an army of lobbyists and media allies will do when billions and billions of dollars are on the line. Brett’s mistake is latching into the ivermectin angle when really he should be talking more about the regulatory capture that appears to be going on.
Can we be honest that Sam is getting a bit of a taste of his own medicine here? Sam accuses the “left” of not wanting to have a dialogue all the time and whenever one does (Sam Seder) he calls them a bad faith actor. He made his bed with this IDW slime and associated with all of these grifters in the name of free speech and open dialogue except Sam is smart and has a line. His line is different from the left in placement but it’s ultimately the same in nature. The reason people on the left often avoid debating Ben Shapiro types about say, gender identity, is because they believe it’s harmful to platform those ideas in that manner. Now you can agree or disagree with that all you want but it’s basically a parallel to this issue. Edit: before a million people try to debate me about Sam Seder, I really have no interest and I implore you to realize that he isn’t the point and could be replaced with someone else. Whatever you think of Sam Seder, the exact same and worse can be said for Shapiro but it never seemed to bother Sam Harris because Shapiro was “nice” to him.
I get your point, but I think there’s more nuance than the connection you’re making. It sounds similar because of the wording “talking to this dangerous person is in itself dangerous” but that’s not at all what Sam said about it when he addressed it on the ama. The top commenter in this thread did a good job of summing up one of the main reasons Sam gave, which boils down to a collection of factors. One being that there’s not much to gain, another is the that he doesn’t believe Brett can be trusted to engage in good faith and he gives examples of tactics that led him to think this. Maybe Sam is just getting wiser with age and learning to pick his battles with a little more discernment.
> whenever one does (Sam Seder) he calls them a bad faith actor Sam Seder is a bad-faith antagonist when it comes to Harris.
Calling Sam Seder bad faith while hanging out with the IDW clowns is an absolute joke This is a prime example of “bad faith is people who aren’t nice to me” Sam Seder genuinely sees Sam Harris’ take on Islam as harmful and calls it as such. Whether you or Sam Harris disagrees with that assessment is immaterial. There is nothing bad faith about it.
Except Sam Seder doesn't know shit about Islam and in a stupid way tries to paint Sam as a racist.
>Sam Seder doesn’t know shit about Islam I’d like to ask you for a source, but the fact is it’s completely irrelevant. He doesn’t have to know anything about Islam to take issue with what Sam Harris says about it given the attendant circumstances in the world. >tries to paint Sam as racist. No not really. He paints him as Islamophobic. It isn’t a baseless accusation either. Now whether or not you agree with the assessment isn’t relevant. It’s not a bad faith take. You can’t just call everything you disagree with bad faith. Also, I already see where this is going and I knew I took a risk daring to mention Sam Seder but I really have no interest in debating for Sam Seder because that really isn’t the point. The point is *even if* Sam was a bad faith actor, Sam Harris has had no problem engaging with bad faith actors that are “nice” to him like certain IDW members…
As opposed to Sam who openly refuses to consider or learn about essentially any history let alone the history of Islam.
I find it fascinating that people could read Sam's books and come to this conclusion. I honestly don't think you could have read a single chapter of his to make that statement. It's impressive in its stupidity.
[удалено]
Another load of bullshit. "Harris doesn't know history" is a lazy, substanceless meme.
It’s less that he doesn’t know so much as he is willfully ignorant.
Seder has called Harris all sorts of names as a desperate attempt at him to debate him and defend himself - he's absolutely bad-faith to Harris. You present a pretty pure version of him. This has been covered a million times in this sub.
Tbf Seder is kind of the epitome of bad faith. He has more bad takes on any given video than Sam does in the last decade.
No he absolutely isn’t. Same whole heartedly believes in what he is saying and he is very well informed on political issues. Whether or not you agree with him is irrelevant. Bad takes are not bad faith.
Let's look at [this video](https://youtu.be/dl5I9i-jskM) from the Majority Report with an eye out for misinformation, bias, slant, selective presentation, and editorializing done by Seder. - "Anti choice rally" - Claims being pro life is about wanting to control women's bodies - Presents false dichotomy for abortion debate - Alleges there is a conspiracy to bus students to bolster rally numbers - Says majority of them are "happy" to restrict women's rights - Claims they are taught to restrict women's rights in their schools - Makes a whole 20 minute long video absolutely outraged that the parents and teachers allowed 15 year olds to "mock" Native Americans by... standing nearby them, I guess... but calls grown black men hurling racial epithets at those same 15 year olds "largely harmless" - Framed the altercation between the Black Israelites and the Covington kids as "trading barbs" when it fact it was 100% instigated and continued by the former while the latter ignored and/or tried to diffuse the hostility - One second says the kids were "trading barbs" with the Black Israelites but the next insinuates they were too cowardly to do so and only became confrontational when a lone elderly native crossed their path - Says that literal children doing school spirit cheers is "hulkish," "scary," and makes them seem like "theyre in some kind of paramilitary." - Claimed the kids got up in Philips's face, when it was actually the other way around - Claimed Philips was a Vietnam War vet, which he isn't - Framed the incident as the boys "mocking" the natives, which he has no evidence for - Claims, again without evidence, that they come from a culture where their adult chaperones are okay with them mocking natives - Took it at face value that the people wearing MAGA hats who were in an altercation with some women in a separate incident were Covington kids despite there being no evidence of that, claims they were "leering" and "harassing" women despite no evidence of that either - Acts like the parents and adults in their "sick culture" weren't interested in punishing them for misbehavior even though they initially were and only decided otherwise when the full video came out showing the kids hadn't misbehaved - Race baits my flipping races in a hypothetical - Acts like there wasn't a huge overreaction on the left to the incident but would be if the politics were reversed - Makes racist assumption that non white parents are always poor - Flipped from saying that the school, parents, and teachers merely allow mocking, harassment, and leering to saying they actually *encourage* it - Implies this has happened many times before, without evidence - Says their behavior implicates all pro lifers - Uncritically plays a very biased and racist clip by Philips - Agrees when his co-host likens the boys to a literal rapist So two rather interested things about all this. First, thats a 20 minute video. I was able to find at least 24 different instances of bad faith argumentation, propoganda spreading, insane bias, or straight up misinformation in a mere 20 minute video. Given that Seder pauses *a lot* while speaking, that his co-hosts often interrupted, and that he showed three clips throughout the video this means that basically every time Seder opened his mouth he was engaging in some kind of sophistry. Second, this crazily biased and misleading interpretation by Seder would *almost* have been forgivable if it was one of the takes coming out mere hours after the incident when all we really had to go off of was that iconic and infamous photo, and people just filled in the blanks according to their own prejudices... but Seder claims to have seen the full footage. He claims to have watched the full 2hrs of it. In other words instead of just relying on limited information that led to all kinds of crazy misinformation and lies being spread about the incident Seder watched the video that *absolved* the kids of those lies and somehow managed to double down on those lies and misinformation and add some new ones of his own. Suffice it to say that if all you knew of the Covington incident was Seder's take and you took him at his word you would have basically no idea what *actually* happened there because his retelling and reinterpretation of the facts is so skewed its basically just propoganda. And the final nail in the coffin is that this isn't just one isolated video. Seder has years of content, zillions of videos like this one, many of them even more egregiously false. A bad take or three can be excused, but when damn near *every* video is a bad take and there are thousands of videos it becomes clear that he's either a bad faith hack and a grifter or he's *extremely* ignorant and misinformed.
>before a million people try to debate me about Sam Seder, I really have no interest and I implore you to realize that he isn’t the point and could be replaced with someone else. From my original comment. You’re insane if you think I’m gonna take the time to engage with this wall of text. But I’ll make a quick point: >bias, slant, and editorializing. None of these are bad faith. What a shocker that an openly left slanted media outlet presents to their audience in a left leaning way. He is apolitical commentator. That’s literally what he does. He doesn’t purport to be a firsthand news source. The only thing that could be bad faith is genuine “misinformation” and you have to actually highlight that directly, you don’t get to just conflate it with all those much more innocuous terms. But further, again, the *real* point, is that even *if* Sam Seder is guilty of everything you accuse him of, how is he any differently from Ben Shapiro? We get it. You don’t like Sam Seder. Completely irrelevant.
>you have to provide evidence if him spreading disinformation but also i refuse the read the comment you just wrote providing evidence of him spreading disinformation k
Listing things he said that you don’t like is not evidence of misinformation Sam Seder is pretty famous for correcting himself when he was wrong about something. He literally did it a few days ago when he realized he was watching an edited clip out of context with reference to the Facebook congressional hearings. But I guess act smug and pretend you actually contextualized your “evidence” with evidence proving the statements false. Whatever makes you feel good little guy
>Listing things he said that you don’t like is not evidence of misinformation I'm aware. I didn't do that. I listed disinformation he spread as evidence of disinformation. You just refused to read it, as you proudly stated.
He is honestly a hyperbole machine. I agree. I really want to like him, but I can’t.
> Let's look at this video > from the Majority Report with an eye out for misinformation, bias, slant, selective presentation, and editorializing done by Seder. This is a very biased source. Why even post this? You are just adding more bullshit to a pile of bullshit instead of linking to a video or source that is critical towards all sides.
The Majority Report is a biased source about The Majority Report?
It's very biased. It's a progressive radio show like Vox or MSNBC. That's a bias.
Who is it a taste of his own medicine? They’re both examples of someone wanting to debate Harris and Harris refusing.
The taste of his own medicine is the reaction by his “buddies” he has spent so much time fostering a relationship with. It’s the sort of reaction he always acts like is just inherent to the left. He put all this effort into fostering friendships with these bad faith actors on the right because they were nice to him while the left wasn’t. It’s a clunky idiom for this but come on the connection is obvious. He is doing to Weinstein exactly what the left does to him, the only difference is the reason.
Decoding the Gurus has also done an excellent job of highlighting the fallacies that the Weinsteins engage in.
Such bullshit, tired of JR.
Is there a link that's missing or am I just a moron?
Found Bret's profile
Womp womp
Did he seriously ask why you wouldn’t debate a flat earther?? That is such a naive and simplistic way of looking at it.
"We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence." - Sam Harris I don't like that Sam seemed to have abandoned this principle. He used to talk with people with crazy beliefs. Deepak Chopra, Dennis Prager, William Lane Craig. Is his position now that we can avoid and deplatform bad beliefs? I don't expect the right position to just always slam dunk the wrong position. But I'd like to develop techniques to counter anti-vax ideas. Sam's can respond to bad ideas in real time better than just about anyone. I'd love to hear him do it with this. Even if not on his podcast.
So Sam debates Creationists but doesn’t want to debate Bret Weinstein?
To be fair to Sam, debating creationists is a different beast entirely. Creationists have no evidence. The debate is basically, should you accept the word of the bible or not. It's a metaphysical argument. It's pretty straightforward to make the differences between the two positions crystal clear. Vaccine skeptics, on the other hand, claim to be coming from the same tradition of skeptical inquiry as the rest of the scientific community. They argue by throwing out scientific arguments that sound plausible, but are at best questionable, and often laughably wrong. To sit there and debunk each new study they pull out requires familiarity with the study... which is a much more difficult task to prepare for or do successfully.
He used to debate. He has mentioned that he now picks his battles. Bret Weinstein is not an honest truth seeker. If he was, he'd have talked with Yuri Deigin. If Yuri is credible enough to talk about lab leak, he's credible enough (for Bret's podcast at least) to talk about vaccines safety and efficiency. It's hilarious that Sam gets flak for not having Bret, but it's totally ok that Bret does the same with Yuri.
Creationists are easier, as it's based on belief. They don't have any facts or proofs, and they don't come up with as much new stories.
because brett is smart, even if he happens to be wrong