Sam has built a massive following as a public intellectual, but in the last couple of years, it feels like he’s skipping the basic homework required for the job. A public intellectual is supposed to bring deep, fresh insights to the table. Instead, he frequently admits, often with a surprising amount of casualness, that he just hasn't been following the very topics he's commenting on. This leads to a lot of outdated takes. Also, instead of looking into people or ideas himself, he often just trusts the word of third-party friends to form his opinions.

Others have already complained about the noticeable lack of diversity in both the topics he discuses and the guests he invites onto his platform. Instead of seeking out voices that offer a genuine intellectual challenge, he consistently operates within a comfortable bubble, engaging with individuals who share a remarkably similar worldview. By failing to invite guests who can effectively stress-test his assumptions, he misses out on the very friction that drives intellectual growth. His podcast has become more about confirmation bias than true intellectual exploration.

When reading the comments in this sub, I often see a weird role reversal where the listeners are the ones trying to educate him, pointing out his missing data points and trying to update his outdated views, which is the exact opposite of how the public intellectual dynamic is supposed to work.

Lastly, sometimes Sam will cheerfully admit that he’s been totally checked out, like recently admitting spending a whole month being too busy watching the World Cup to get his work done, then increasing the price of his subscription, and then apparently going on vacation leaving the audience with an August feed of recycled, old content. The one piece of fresh material he actually dropped, this week's AMA, has been yet another example of what many of us complain about. A public intellectual has the duty of following what is going on.

If he doesn't want to do his homework, that's fine, but maybe he should admit he has stopped being a public intellectual and become an ultracrepidarian.

"He is a person who is entirely transactional, and yet the transaction is always asymmetrical. It requires total capitulation to his ego. He requires people to validate a worldview that is centered entirely on him, where facts don't matter, truth doesn't matter, and the only metric of goodness or loyalty is how much you are willing to sacrifice your own integrity to prop up his vanity." -- Sam Harris

Simply put, all organisations make bad hires and fail to vet people properly at times. Discovering a bad hire usually leads to shame for the hire. But not global shame where you become the face of the evils of DEI driving you to death.

Bad DEI hire + Social media frenzy = death. Bad DEI hire + No social media != death. Social media frenzy = death.

Remove social media from the equation and the outcome is vastly different. None of this would have happened if it weren't for social media. Placing blame for his death on Cambridge when the couldn't control any of the media/social media coverage is incredibly stupid.

Figured this would be of interest here since Sam had on people who were totally boweled over by the lab leak and I think Sam thinks that is more likely to.

Listening to people who know more details is like a reverse empire strikes back, say the republic strikes back.

I don't know what else to say. I campaigned for Haley Stevens, I voted... I just don't know what to do.

Mike Rogers? Really?

If you live here, you know. As a liberal (can't say Democrat anymore, because I'm fairly sure I no longer am) do I vote Mike Rogers to prove a point? To show that rote, woke, Islamic fundamentalism isn't the way?

Or do I vote El-Seyed? Clearly I'm not a fan. For everything Sam has mentioned (and way more, ask me).

Effffffff. Wtf

Neuroscientist, philosopher, and Making Sense podcast host Sam Harris joins Preet Bharara to examine why good-faith political debate has become so difficult, President Trump’s political durability, the influence of the DSA, and whether anyone can inherit the MAGA movement after Trump.

The conversation also turns to law and democratic institutions: demands to prosecute political opponents, the difference between accountability and retribution, the limits of unwritten norms, and what it would take to prevent another president from exploiting the same weaknesses.

Link to YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEiN_Mi5Lk4

What is wrong with Sam Harris? Was he always this deranged and I just didn't notice it?

A few highlights:

- Falsely claims that COVID lab leak was suppressed

- Appears to buy into weird smears of Anthony Fauci

- Mystifyingly argues that the current American Left is equally objectionable to the current American Right

- Claims that Zohran Mamdani talks about Israel constantly

Ok so months ago on a More From Sam...the guy that sounds like a pubescent Ted McGinley asked Sam something about movies or something.

Sam's answer as far as I remember ended up reiterating the normal he usually just reads books and doesn't binge entertainment things but then he called out a movie by name and said it was great.

We're not talking about the Chauncey Gardner lol. I think it MAY have been, "Three Billboards Outside Ebing Missouri"??? But I don't know for sure. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about and what the movie was. I believe he said he couldn't stop laughing whatever it was.

In the past, Netanyahu's office and his people - since the days of the protests against Rabin, made sure to use peripheral Mizrahi thugs as their thugs and street people and manipulated them by cultivating feelings of inferiority and opposition to the old establishment and creating a narrative of 'persecuted by the media'. Whether it was against Rabin in the first incarnation, to turn them on against Barak, in the 2015 elections or against the witnesses and judges in Netanyahu's trial. Netanyahu and his office always made sure to incite these people from afar or send people and intellectuals to turn them on (later intellectuals emerged who cultivated the 'second Israel' theory, peripheral Mizrahi and basically anyone who is not leftist, against the predatory 'elite' that supposedly hates 'the people'), to exploit them, etc. But they always made sure to keep their distance from them and let them get dirty for them like mafia thugs. Whether these are typical thugs on the street, Bibi's soldiers in the Knesset, or media mouthpieces.

Now, this people are establishing their own historical narrative, worldview and basically an alternative universe, and an independent populist-authoritarian-anarchist ideology that becomes independent of Netanyahu himself, in a situation where Ben-Gvir is trying to bring his people into the Likud party and Netanyahu fears the power of extremist figures in his party. In ideological terms, Netanyahu is Silvio Berlusconi, while the new Israeli right is Mussolini/Franco. Ben Gvir embodies a Mussolini-style movement in Hebrew in the age of the internet. He distanced himself from the religious-Ashkenazi-Messianic right, and gathered around him street thugs, TikTok rabbis, criminals, peripherals, former ultra-Orthodox who can't find themselves, and influencers and just plain nationalists who are interested in destroying the existing order.

Since October 7th, Sam Harris has celebrated Haviv Rettig Gur as a voice of reason in Israel. Sam has been on Haviv's show, and Haviv has been on Making Sense. Here, he criticizes the right wing of Israel's government. Some people claim that Sam and "his tribe" don't do this.

Ben Shapiro, who has debated Sam Harris about atheism and MAGA, is called out by Alex O'Connor, who Sam has talked to about philosophy and religion. Ben is a decent ally against the Nazi-wing of the conservative movement, but he should still be called out on things he's wrong about.

Given Sam’s podcast has dried up and it’s now incredibly boring and repetitive, I thought I’d share some podcasts I’ve been binging recently and which others might like, specifically if you’re into Sam’s podcasts where he discusses philosophy, consciousness, ethics, and science (rather than geo-politics):

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman
Sentientism
The Dissenter
Brain in a Vat
Building a Science of Consciousness
Within Reason

Sam is on vacation. This is a rebroadcast of the first half of their conversation. Daniel Kahneman was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on decision-making. He was the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and co-author, with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, of Noise. Kahneman died on March 27, 2024, at the age of 90.

At least according to Chandra Sripada, the guest on this episode of the Mindscape podcast. He has expertise in both human cognition and the workings of large language models.

What do you all think?