Buckle up for this one. Not my usual content, but I’m just getting on a plane that was delayed for three hours and listening to a talk with one of our most prominent “new atheists.” I’m convinced this chat bears some relevance to the community, if tangentially.
I do love Sam Harris. One part of this I find objectionable is his assertion that capitalism is the best tool we have to solve wealth inequality, but that’s maybe off-topic here and I don’t expect most of this community to share my feelings on that anyway. I’m happy to discuss it in Matrix.
On the other hand, he makes some excellent points on how the left is hungrily eating its own tail and how.
I got about an hour in but didn’t really hear anything new on the topic. The interviewer even brought it back up.
They did mention being invited to dinner parties with the intention of engaging on subjects but they didn’t mention how to realize when you’ve gone too far. I’d say to avoid hot topics at dinner parties but I’m hardly a good example for that.
I did like the point that debates are never intended to change the minds of the participants, simply by our expectation of how a debate functions.
Harris admitted they haven’t debated in many years. I think this shows in how he was talking about how “woke” activists fail to “realize” all the stats he brought up. In my experience, activists do know these statistics. Harris won’t know because he won’t debate them.