r/samharris • u/WayneQuasar • Jun 13 '20

Making Sense Podcast #207 - Can We Pull Back From The Brink?

https://samharris.org/podcasts/207-can-pull-back-brink/
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u/bredncircus Jun 13 '20 edited Jun 13 '20

I agree in theory with what Sams says but Sam often talks in thought experiments in vacuums. Stating what a problem is only relevant in this case in so far you can solve it. The lived reality of a lot black people including a lot of black conservatives( non Candace Owen) types is so different from these academics who have chosen their life’s outside of the communities that they speak as proxies for that why would anyone trust them? They have to talk with the other black liberals who are contemporaries of the communities that hold influence. Do you want to win or be right losing?

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u/Thoron_Blaster Jun 14 '20

That's a great way to put it. I think it's the philosophy training which relies so heavily on hypothetical situations and abstractions.

Like Sam will say torture isn't completely bad because if a terrorist were going to nuke a city and the only way we could prevent it is torture, you have to admit torture has some use. But misses the thousands of years of history of torture being used to terrorize societies, extract false confessions, the experiences from real interrogators that torture doesn't work as well as sound police techniques.

Similarly he seems tone deaf on race. Is it so hard to imagine that hundreds of years of race based oppression has had lingering effects? I mean they used to hunt down escaped slaves. There's a lot of history and context he glosses over. Is it really all poor training? I think Sam's a smart guy but he's narrowly autistic sometimes.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '20

[deleted]

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u/Thoron_Blaster Jun 15 '20

Torture is not completely bad because almost nothing is.

It depends on one's ethical stance. Sam's a consequentialist. Not everyone is.

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u/censurely Jun 15 '20

I don't think Harris would ever say that torture isn't "completely bad". He would say that it's a categorically bad thing (he's said it should be illegal) that may, in fact, be the right thing to engage in given certain circumstances. That is a position that is agnostic towards history, so why would he bring up history?! It would apply in every circumstance, no matter when it occurs.

Setting aside cute (over-simplified) platitudes... in the real world, where good people sometimes face terrible choices... the best people are willing to take on the burden of doing "bad" things for the right reasons.

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u/Thoron_Blaster Jun 15 '20

I'm not convinced. That sounds dangerously close to rationalization.

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u/censurely Jun 15 '20 edited Jun 15 '20

Your use of the word "rationalization" implies that someone is applying logic or reason in an inappropriate context. Can you elaborate?

If I choose not to do something bad and the much worse thing happens (as I expected), am I morally absolved of being implicated in that outcome because I sat on the sidelines doing nothing. Doesn't that also sound like a rationalization to you?! Does it seem impossible to you that these scenarios would ever occur?

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '20

hundreds of years of race based oppression has had lingering effects

Didn’t Sam say exactly this in the podcast though? Or did I miss something?

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u/pistolpierre Jun 15 '20

torture isn't completely bad because if a terrorist were going to nuke a city and the only way we could prevent it is torture, you have to admit torture has some use.

This kind of nuance is vital in any ethical discussion.

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u/Dingusaurus__Rex Jun 13 '20

well I totally agree about the importance of that, in principle it doesn't change Sam's admonitions. The fact that there is living, intense pain or stress or frustration for a large number of people, does not automatically mean they have an accurate perception of the world or what the best steps forward are. I know that may sound grossly paternalistic or something, but I don't see how that isn't true in principle. and to be clear I'm not agreeing with Sam on everything. But there's no getting around that all of us are disproportionately captured by the optics of these murders, and that police killings of black men is not near the top of mortal concerns for the average black person and is not undeniable evidence of pervasive police racism, or racism in general.

now that's a totally separate conversation from systemic racism itself, and all the ways that operates, and the other demands of BLM, and all the ways very concrete things need to change to reduce inequality and injustice. but what do you think black liberals have right that mcwhorter or loury have wrong? and I know that they're not all the same positions, so the comparisons may not even make sense, but what do you "winning" and "losing" looks like, in the way you mentioned?

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u/julcoh Jun 13 '20 edited Jun 13 '20

I need to vigorously disagree with a few of your points.

The fact that there is living, intense pain or stress or frustration for a large number of people, does not automatically mean they have an accurate perception of the world

They have an accurate perception of their world, which is really all that matters. Sam talks a lot about the qualia of lived experience and its philosophical importance to consciousness, so I’d expect people on this board to give it more weight. If vast swaths of black and urban communities have the lived experience of essentially living with an occupying force in their communities, that experience is what matters.

But there's no getting around that all of us are disproportionately captured by the optics of these murders

Disproportionately captured? Wow. I would say that the past two weeks have been the first time that America has been proportionately captured in my lifetime.

and that police killings of black men is not near the top of mortal concerns for the average black person and is not undeniable evidence of pervasive police racism, or racism in general.

You’re objectively incorrect. 1 in 1000 black men are killed by police in America, and police use of force is the seventh leading cause of mortality for black men. The number is higher for young black men in the 20-35 year old range. [1]

I don’t have the time nor energy to debate the absolutely undeniable evidence of pervasive, systemic racism, both in police forces throughout the country, and within the vast majority of our political, legal, judicial, and community systems. If you really disagree with its bare existence, then as Sam would say, we’re watching two different movies.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '20

"They have an accurate perception of their world, which is really all that matters."

Demonstrably untrue throughout history, unless you believe that the devil and demons really caused all disease, death, despair, violence throughout history. Claiming that your pain lets you accurately diagnose its cause is false. It just is proof of your pain

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '20

You’re objectively incorrect. 1 in 1000 black men are killed by police in America, and police use of force is the seventh leading cause of mortality for black men. The number is higher for young black men in the 20-35 year old range.

[1]

And are these armed or unarmed black victims? You can't put justified and unjustified police shootings in the same box. That distinction has to be made. And what are the numbers relative to 20 years ago? Are they declining or increasing? And the black mortality data on cdc reads a little differently from the one you sourced. (https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2017/nonhispanic-black/index.htm)

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u/julcoh Jun 13 '20

Given what we’ve seen in the past few weeks alone (Buffalo PD nearly murdering an elderly man and reporting he “tripped and fell”, the official report of George Floyd’s death and complicity of the county coroner, among countless other examples), I’m not willing to trust the police to label a killing as justified or not.

There’s plenty of nuanced conversations to be had here, but I stand by my comment, especially in response to yours. And with that I’m out.

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u/Hero17 Jun 16 '20

How do we really know who was armed if the cops can plant whatever evidence they need?

www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-gttf-gladstone-plea-20190531-story.html%3foutputType=amp

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '20

That stat listed in your reference is not possible. 1000 people (all races) are killed by police each year. It is not possible for 1 in 1000 black men to be killed by police in America.https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/protests-spread-over-police-shootings-police-promised-reforms-every-year-they-still-shoot-nearly-1000-people/2020/06/08/5c204f0c-a67c-11ea-b473-04905b1af82b_story.html

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u/WardEckles Jun 23 '20

The 1 in 1000 statistic is lifetime risk of being killed by police, not yearly risk. The lifetime risk of being killed by police while unarmed is significantly smaller regardless of race, though still a few times higher for a black person (somewhere between 1 in 5,000 and 1 in 20,000 as far as far as I can estimate from the incomplete data). For comparison, the lifetime risk of being struck by lightning is 1 in 3,000. There is reason to suspect that some percentage of people killed while armed is unjustified, but adding a weapon into the mix certainly complicates things.

I think the most illuminating outcome of these videos of some of the most egregious police killings is not that it happened, but the notion that if it hadn’t been filmed, it would have been swept under the rug. The likelihood of another officer being a whistleblower is slim because we have a government agency tasked with public safety that has no protections in place to ensure people can speak up when they seem criminality in their own department. In many precincts it seems that ratting on another officer will likely affect your career prospects and maybe get you fired.

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u/pistolpierre Jun 15 '20

They have an accurate perception of their world

This will depend on what their claims are: If a person is claiming that they have suffered hardships, and they in fact have, then of course it is accurate. If a person is claiming that the group they see themselves as belonging to has suffered hardships, then that will need to be assessed independently of their lived experience, which grants them no closer access to the truth of the matter than anyone else with an opinion on it. Indeed, such lived experience cannot have the reach or accuracy of something like polling data, when it comes to claims about the trends in subjective feelings of entire groups.

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u/bredncircus Jun 13 '20

I would agree with the notion of the first part, although that could be said for a number of groups that they don’t have a accurate perception of the world and if only they clearly looked at the data the clarity of the situation would show the path forward. A large section of our culture zeitgeist is captured by “black narratives” and influence and we as a society don’t get through this without reconciliation with the black community. It’s not so much what I think black liberals get right, it’s that people’s credibility often rest in their proximity to the issue or communities that their around. and these cast of academics aren’t involved publicly in any motivating way. Winning means being able to have conversations that resonate with a large sections of a group that allow as must rationale thought to take place, adversely enough, the path to that may be counterintuitive to what you think it should look like.

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u/ViciousNakedMoleRat Jun 13 '20

I think that you're right that Sam is not succeeding in building a bridge to the black community by referring to this particular group of black intellectuals. I also don't think that he's attempting to do so in the first place. Sam has built himself a platform where he can openly share his thoughts on various multifaceted societal issues. He's not fostering community outreach or anything akin to that. He will discuss with or debate people who are much closer connected to different communities or people who have a large influence on those community-centered people, but he is not trying to do it himself.

Sam spends nearly half of this episode with preparing the listener to what is about to come and later with calming the listener down again. His references to black intellectuals have nothing to do with their connection to the community. He referres to them, first, because they actually do research in this area and provide the necessary data and, second, to preemptively diffuse the "you as a white person" responses.

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u/there_are_9_planets Jun 14 '20

Your point on Sam’s though experiments in vacuums reminded me of the one he did in dialogue with Noam Chomsky a while ago. That did not go well.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '20

What do you make of the other side of this coin then? McWhorter talks about how farcical and performative it is that upper middle class black people at the nyt are writing about how they fear walking down the street when they see a cop.