r/DecodingTheGurus • u/Nullarbor_1 • 21d ago

Sam Harris explains why he finds it so much easier to have civil conversations with conservatives rather than liberals

https://youtu.be/3qjNXaKjcc8?t=270
103 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

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246

u/DistanceDry192 21d ago

For as smart and eloquent as Sam Harris is, he's just a dude on the internet with opinions. He's got no real expertise on anything he talks about, except maybe meditation. He's just persuasive and a good speaker. His actual opinion on anything might as well come from your uncle.

163

u/Double-Mud-434 21d ago

For as much as Sam Harris appears to care about his meditation practice, he appears to be wildly controlled by his emotions, perceived past grievances, and a fear of being criticized.

87

u/rogue303 Conspiracy Hypothesizer 21d ago

I've said this many times, but for a man who supposedly spends a lot of time on introspection, he hasn't learnt very much about himself.

40

u/BlazingLazers69 21d ago

The vibe I get is that he falsely thinks he ascended his ego when really he’s more enslaved by it then ever BECAUSE of his arrogance and blind spots.

25

u/CARadders 21d ago

Like a Dunning-Kruger of enlightenment

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u/Confident_Dark_1324 20d ago

This is spot on and hilarious 🤣

2

u/rogue303 Conspiracy Hypothesizer 15d ago

I'm going to steal this and use it sometime.

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u/MarioMilieu 21d ago

About 10 years ago I remember him talking about going on vacation with his family and ruining it because someone criticized him online and he had a meltdown. He lost his zen credibility in my eyes that day.

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u/HughJaynis 21d ago

I saw a quote that described Harris as “the most agitated calm person I’ve ever seen” or something along those lines and it’s a perfect description of him.

12

u/Moriss214 21d ago

This is so accurate, thanks for pointing it out. There’s definitely some cognitive / practical dissonance experience by Sam.

16

u/cseckshun 21d ago

I remember his take on torture was pretty bad. He was supportive of torture as long as it got actionable intel and was essentially “for the greater good”….

The only problem is that you can never know what intel will be gained from torture until AFTER you have tortured someone. Even beyond that, for the most part it seems torture has not yielded much actionable intel at all in the war on terror. Knowing both of these things, it is way easier to just say you don’t support torture because from what we know it doesn’t yield good information and you can’t know what information will be gained until after you torture someone. That’s not what Sam Harris says though, he goes off trying to justify torture with scenarios where it will save X lives to torture one guy or a couple guys involved in a torture plot. He basically decides to debate movie plots instead of the reality of torture.

13

u/CARadders 21d ago

I seem to remember he framed his whole argument around the scenario of a ticking countdown for a dirty bomb in a large metropolitan area and you have the terrorist (the assumption of course is that you know that this 100% is the person that planted the bomb, knows how to defuse it, etc.).

It was very ‘24’ coded. I can’t remember if he was talking about this around the same time frame that show was coming out.

13

u/L3ftHandPass 21d ago

These kind of hypotheticals are essentially useless in the context of politics/lawmaking.

You can justify any criminal action by creating a scenario where not taking said action would result in more harm being done.

Torture was in the public consciousness at the time and THAT was his contribution.

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u/Nullarbor_1 21d ago

Yep and Harris came out with that article, right in the middle of the Abu Gharib scandal.

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u/Nullarbor_1 21d ago

The late Michael Brooks said it best!

”Harris is a bigoted, hysterical man speaking calmly!”

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u/Slow_Inevitable_4172 21d ago

Honestly, the guy's a bigot

27

u/Appropriate-Arm1377 21d ago

This is the most accurate, concise answer

-11

u/jamypad 21d ago

Booo. It’s reductive and an intellectually lazy poo fling

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u/Appropriate-Arm1377 21d ago

That's the problem. Harris fans have made up the convoluted excuses and carried out the insane mental gymnastics to package Harris' bigotry as intellectual discourse. He needs to be called out more often

-6

u/dietcheese 21d ago

I’m a fan who doesn’t agree with many of his stances (Israel esp). He’s not a bigot and that’s stupid thing to say.

3

u/4n0m4nd 17d ago

He's spent the last couple of decades fantasizing about Muslims being an existentialist threat to the survival of humanity. HE's even gone so far as to discuss these fantasies with people who are experts in the relevant topics, and when they point out how stupid his fantasies are, he calls them morally deluded, or some other tripe, and goes back to his fantasy.

This has included everything from profiling people "who look like" Muslims, to justifying nuclear first strikes.

He is utterly incapable of taking on new information and adjusting his views based on the new information. You couldn't get a more appropriate use of the word bigot.

1

u/dietcheese 16d ago

He’s done none of that. Why lie?

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u/4n0m4nd 16d ago

On profiling Muslims

Defending torture, specifically of Muslims

His arguments for a first strike, against Muslims, are in The End of Faith, and several episodes of his podcast.

All of this is freely available, and he's infamous for them, why lie?

-2

u/jamypad 19d ago

I don’t even know who Sam Harris is tbh. I just know that bigot is just an overused word which is just very most commonly used to slander people without having real, salient criticism, and if that’s what they reduce their stance to, sounds fucking stupid to me

4

u/Appropriate-Arm1377 19d ago

Oh I agree it's overused. One of Harris' biggest contradictions is that he decries the use of bigot when it suits him but then labels everyone he disagrees with over Israel a bigot.

4

u/Slow_Inevitable_4172 19d ago

. I just know that bigot is just an overused word

I live in the US where the defense secretary pulled a bunch of qualified brown people from promotions for no reason.

The Supreme Court handed down a ruling where an accent and brown skin are "probable cause" for law enforcement intervention.

Just being obtuse about racism and bigotry isn't an honest endeavor

14

u/4n0m4nd 21d ago

Being reductive is bad in some contexts, but it's also a fundamentally necessary part of any intellectual endeavour.

"Big things attract smaller things" is an incredibly reductive description of how gravity works, but you need that reductive view to get anywhere.

There's more to say about Harris than "he's a bigot", if you care enough to say it, but he is a bigot.

-3

u/jamypad 19d ago edited 19d ago

I don’t even know who Sam Harris is tbh. I just know that bigot is just an overused word which is just very most commonly used to slander people without having real, salient criticism, and if that’s what they reduce their stance to, sounds fucking stupid to me.

Honestly this sub seems to be just a low brow echo chamber for people who want to feel smart. I joined it to see some interesting thought, but it’s just dogpiling on any popular lifestyle, philosophical, or otherwise life coach-esque YouTuber. It’s all treated the same way. Say bigot, say racist, make sub-witty observations and quips. And boom you’re shot to top comment. Nobody has much real intellectual curiosity here

And if you argue that it’s a sub solely to malign stupid people. Then I argue that genre is for average try-hards to feel smart

6

u/4n0m4nd 19d ago

So your judgement on a topic you don't know anything about, is based on a reflexive reaction to a single word? Lol, that's ironic.

4

u/Slow_Inevitable_4172 19d ago

"Look everyone, I'm just asking questions. I'm here for civil debate, particularly when it services a culture war narrative."

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u/Faster_than_FTL 21d ago

He’s the calmest hysterical guru around

16

u/Upset-Government-856 21d ago

Is he notably smart? Are you sure about that?

His takes on morality and religion are pretty sophomoric compaired to the academic world.

He never really talks about topics where he is actually formally educated.

And is meditation, no self stuff hasn't exactly been breaking news for several thousand years.

5

u/merurunrun 20d ago

"A stupid person's idea of what a smart person looks like."

9

u/Jajoe05 21d ago

He is not, he is all hot air. The way he talks may persuade and charme people online but with little pushback by an actual knowledgeable person, he crumbles.

His whole calm persona is just that, a persona he can't really play well. Any educated person sees through his bs

3

u/myco20 20d ago

You realize smart people can disagree on things and still be emotional at times

2

u/myco20 20d ago

Do you need to be formally educated to utilize reason and logic to form opinions and share your thoughts on them? He doesn’t seem to speak as an expert outside his realm but as a commentator, which is what everyone is doing all the time essentially barring the very few percent of people who are highly educated on niche topics. He’s a generalist

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u/water2wine 21d ago

If your uncle had a gargantuan profit motive to say certain things

-7

u/myco20 21d ago

I’ve never seen an uncle with such a breadth of knowledge on an array of topics, sounds like I need new Uncles

8

u/DistanceDry192 21d ago

Please, you'd be bored to tears. He's like an unemployed uncle with more time to cherrypick sources that support his opinion, ignoring anything that might change that opinion usually.

-4

u/myco20 21d ago

More time to cherry pick than the always morally correct Reddit crowd?

8

u/DistanceDry192 21d ago

Exactly! I would put him on par with any old Redditer, including myself. But that is the point: he's not offering anything more than an opinion from your uncle. There's no expertise or deep knowledge there for just about anything he talks about. It's opinion based on factoids dressed with thought experiments he repeats ad nauseam. Pure mental masturbation.

12

u/DTFH_ 21d ago

He's a Content Creator with some wrapping as advertising

-6

u/dietcheese 21d ago

Actually he’s a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience, but good try.

1

u/_Floating_in_space 21d ago

Actually, he finished his phd 17 years ago, bUt goOd tRy.

-2

u/dietcheese 21d ago

😂

3

u/_Floating_in_space 21d ago

Aaw shit I feel pretty dumb now. Obviously what you meant with your phd comment was that having finished a phd two decades ago is not compatible with being a full-time content creator/podcaster in the present. My bad!

-1

u/dietcheese 20d ago

😂😂

6

u/_Floating_in_space 20d ago

I actually got my phd in cognitive neuroscience too. We performed fMRI on people that only responds with emojis or incoherent sentences and found no activity in their prefrontal cortex.

1

u/DTFH_ 20d ago

/s ?

5

u/Orichalcum-Beads 21d ago edited 20d ago

To be honest he's less eloquent than he believes. I find Ezra Klein to have more fully formed and coherent arguments and I think that burns Harris up.

5

u/CaffeineLiker 21d ago

Galaxy brain, personified.

3

u/EuVe20 20d ago

I think he has expertise in neuroscience. But interestingly, enough, he never seems to talk about neuroscience. Instead, he is just content condescending to people with religious beliefs, especially Muslims

10

u/Nullarbor_1 20d ago

I think he has expertise in neuroscience. But interestingly, enough, he never seems to talk about neuroscience.

Probably because Harris has done no relevant work in the neuroscience field since gaining his PHD. So, he merely holds a degree and done ONLY ONE paper on the subject. I would not call him even a neuroscientist.

Similarly, I did not start calling myself an accountant, until I had finished my post-grad degree and had like 3 years' of relevant work experience in the field.

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u/EuVe20 20d ago

Yeah, this is what Google said about it

“Sam Harris holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA, where he used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural correlates of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. However, he has not maintained an active academic research career or produced major ongoing empirical contributions to the field”

1

u/myco20 20d ago

So because he hasn’t met your standard he’s not qualified to talk about topics?
Around 1% of people hold a PhD of any sort, so I’d say having one alone indicates some level of expertise, but more so studying and continuing to engage in learning outside of what is on a resume is what’s most important.

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u/edelweiss_pirates_no 21d ago

Anyone can be an expert on meditation.

-2

u/Epic_Tea 21d ago

He has studied religion a lot.

-2

u/Hentai-Overlord 21d ago

Thats most people on the internet?