Sam's embrace of HBD was jarringly sudden (he interviewed Charles Murray and downed the Kool-aid in one big gulp). Because of that, his fanbase didn't slowly drift rightward along side him the way Scott's fans did.
So now his subreddit is a mixture of mostly new right-wing fans saying "Woo! you tell those SJWs!" and mostly old left-wing fans saying "What the fuck happened to you?".
Yup - I never really liked Sam Harris, because of his neoconservatism and such, but I could see how if you were a slightly sheltered middle class left-leaning secular white dude, you could be into him. Now, if you're that same left-leaning secular white dude, all of the sudden, you're like, "I liked the podcasts about Buddhism, truth seeking, and such. Why are all the podcasts and interviews about IQ and random weirdoes I haven't deal with since college?"
The neoconservatism is one thing, but I don't see how anyone could like him because his ideas even outside of politics (like meta-ethics or philosophy at large) are pretty dog shit. His popularity is beyond my comprehension.
I mean, his non-politics stuff is mostly useless BS built for 'rational' dudes who think they can't fall for BS, but it's largely harmless in the larger scheme of things.
It'd be sort of if like Deepak Chopra suddenly started talking about immigration levels or something. A lot of his fans would be shocked.
I wouldn't say it's harmless. I think a lot of his fans encounter certain topics for the first time through him, and don't realize that his and his guests' ideas about them are often quite cranky and fringe. (Sound familiar?) He'd be *less* dangerous if he sounded like Alex Jones.
They're not as harmful *per se*, but I don't think it takes much background to realize he's not a good intellectual from how sloppy his work is. For example, his twitter thread about the is/ought gap is laughably bad
Tell that "harmless" bit to the part of my brain equipped for sympathy (not empathy: sympathy) that has now atrophied from attempting to politely explain why David Hume was not talking literally complete bunk about matters of fact and matters of value, and nobody in academia should ever be trusted unless they agree with you.
The connection between his blatantly racist, transphobic, "fuck you to the thoughtful world" podcasts with both Murrays and his rhetoric about all foregoing moral philosophy in The Moral Landscape is skin-deep.
The whole thing is a web of lies and confusion for his own financial benefit and I'm not gonna take it any more, because he literally built the whole thing on pretending that he was the only rational guy in the room and then ran with it, taking his fans with him even to the ends of his own arrogance and stupidity.
dude this guy has defended racial profiling.
how come people only found out he's a trashcan because he likes charles murray?
and that's without going into his war crime apologia (cause let's face it, that's popular in america)
Also "thought experiments" about torture, glassing the Middle East, opposing the not-mosque at not-ground zero, claiming the 5th amendment is religious bullshit, claiming that freedom of religion is a bad idea, wanting to establish a neuroscience based big brother, etc.
>In a legal context, some scholars have already begun to worry that reliable lie detection will constitute an infringement of a person’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. But the Fifth Amendment has already succumbed to advances in our technology. The Supreme Court has ruled that defendants can be forced to provide samples of their blood, saliva, and other physical evidence that may incriminate them. ***In fact, the prohibition against compelled testimony appears to be a relic of a more superstitious time: it was once widely believed that lying under oath would damn a person’s soul for eternity.*** I doubt whether even many fundamentalist Christians now imagine that an oath sworn on a courtroom Bible has such cosmic significance.
https://samharris.org/true-lie-detection/
Ah, the answer is no. No, I did not want to know.
> Fifth Amendment **privilege** against self-incrimination
At least the error's easy enough to identify.
There are a few really good posters on there who just Will. Not. Give. Up. on trying to turn the place around. I don't understand them, but they're definitely not just trolling. A few are older atheists who never quite adjusted to the devastating aftermat of that blowjob Murray interview.
> This reduces them to the extraordinary last resort of debating with actual facts and evidence.
This just seems like a failure of imagination on Scott's part.
Reminds me a lot of professional “ex-Marxists”. People who come up
with meta-level ad hoc justifications for an ideological move they
always wanted to make anyway.
That's where the term "neoconservative" originally came from. People who ditched the leftism but not the savior complex. You just have to replace the bourgeoisie with the "axis of evil".
Even his subreddit aren’t buying that one lol.
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Charles Murray, the beacon of good faith arguments.
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FTFY.
Reminds me a lot of professional “ex-Marxists”. People who come up with meta-level ad hoc justifications for an ideological move they always wanted to make anyway.