Full podcast episode: ua-cam.com/video/Qyrjgf-_Vdk/v-deo.html Lex Fridman podcast channel: ua-cam.com/users/lexfridman Guest bio: Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, and philosopher.
@@Alien_Empathy yes i agree. But the point he's arguing is even more basic: just that it matters if someone has knowledge of what they're saying. Even that seems to be to a degree something we don't all quite agree on
@@Alien_Empathy what makes it dangerous is the inability to tell from credible data and mom credible data. The numbers can be manipulated by that takes an educated mind and we keep devaluing academics and gutting the education system. This is just making people dumber faster. We don't even know the questions to ask let alone recognize the information we're looking at when it's presented.
The value of doing your own research on complex issues isn’t to replace the experts, it’s knowing what questions to ask. You can quickly identify what you aren’t being told.
Going on the assumption that the research will fill in enough gaps of information to be able to formulate the questions. As we all know, that isn’t often the case.
That is brilliant. I think. You probably gave me the angle I needed for my final work in my epistemology course I'll do on the lab leak covid case. Thank you.
Far too often people do their own "research" only to the point of finding conflicting information and siding with that. Very few bother to then verify the value of this conflicting information or it's sources because more than likely they would end up coming full circle. This is why social media was an absolute mess of insane conspiracies during the pandemic.
One thing Sam needs to nail in is the affect of capture on expertise. It’s the biggest issue we face as a society, and the last three years have been a massive wake up call for those who had be previously unaware that this was even possible.
I will listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson when he is talking about Pluto. I will listen to Bill Gates when he is talking about computer operating systems. Stay in your lane and be willing to defend your ideas openly and honestly against criticism and you will be doing your part to restore trust in experts.
What does Bill Gates know about operating systems other than stealing someone else’s code if I want to learn how to monetize every human being on the planet, then I’ll listen to Bill Gates.
@@shanehackett4683 they absolutely do not. if you actually vetted their data yourself you would know but you don't so you must lean on your trust of their credentials, like a fool.
@@_jow you don’t know what you’re taking about. You don’t even HAVE the knowledge to vet their data. What credentials do you have? None? Okay, I’ll listen to the guy with decades of training and experience instead of some dip on UA-cam
Precisely. You should not believe in anything spouted by experts or scientists who can not supply empirical evidence to back up their claims. 97% of "climate scientists" claim the earth is warming because of human activities. But not one iota of evidence can they show, nor can they give any measureable statistics as to what any of their bunk ideas can achieve in cooling the earth.
If a family member got cancer and you spent the next four years learning as much as you could from as many sources as you could, about cancer, treatments, protocols, outcomes, it won’t make you an oncologist. But you’d be in a pretty darn good space to choose the oncologist you wanted to work with.
After working as an engineer, one of the things I've noticed is that people who are really awful and incompetent can still rise to the top of certain institutions. For companies and agencies that have a lot of money, and have dysfunctional leadership, you will see incompetent people rocket to the top. In a poorly run company or agency, most of the competent people leave, and it clears the path for buffoons to reign. Far from being a cutthroat world where your ability to generate a profit determines your fate, I've found that big companies tend to act as corporate welfare for bad engineers and bad managers. I once worked with a guy that had a great resume, ~10 years experience, fully licensed, and a degree from Berkley... but he was so incompetent, he literally could not design a slab of concrete. I used to wonder if his degree was fake. However, members of the public could not easily tell that this guy sucked. All his colleagues knew he sucked, other civil engineers knew he sucked, but a member of the public couldn't tell. That is, until they build the slab of concrete he designed. But by then it's too late. So if I'm checking someone out, I try to see what their peers think of them. If you have someone who is well respected by their peers, or a leader in the industry, that's typically a good sign.
@Havik they think they are smarter, usually they are not. Plenty have good memories and repeat what they have been taught but cannot think critically for themselves, as things progress and we learn more about certain topics these educated people are usually the last to go against what they were trained to think even when it's clearly wrong
It's amazing that Sam can speak so authoritatively on this subject when he completely disregarded world renowned experts that were silenced and was completely wrong. After that, he's admitted that he's okay with those experts being silenced. He actively tried to stop people from talking to competent experts. If nothing else, Sam has shown that a very smart person can be absolutely incorrect on all fronts when they're needed. He then goes on to show how terrible he is at coming to terms with his failure as a renowned intellectual. He won't admit his failures. He just admits that it was rational to be a failure in that moment. It's fine. His life wasn't ruined. So it's fine. That's a very strange mind trap that he's built for himself.
I don’t believe Sam was wrong. So many people appear to ignore that during Covid the available knowledge kept changing as the situation evolved. There were many “Experts” were making claims like the efficacy of Ivermectin, the value of wearing masks, the danger the new nRNA vaccines. Time has shown that many of these experts were just wrong. Sam’s position during the pandemic was to support the people who were responsible for making public policy and critic people who were promoting an alternate view but had no responsibility for public policy. If there is no consistency of opinion on what to do next then we become paralysed. It became obvious that in our society that some people believe everyone in authority is corrupt and only they know the truth. No amount of “internet research” makes anyone an expert. Most people are so uneducated on a complex topic that they can not properly understand what they are reading or decipher when someone else is promoting thoughts that are not proven. The fact the the death rates dramatically declined in all countries once the vaccinations levels reached over 70% is indisputable evidence that they saved lives. Remember back to before the vaccines when mass graves were being dug all over the world. I challenge anyone to point to any position Sam took and say that it was wrong, when considering what was known and proven to be correct at the time. Easily to have 20/20 vision in hindsight, we all have that. Think about how many vaccines have been administered since 2021 and of those (billions) how many people have had side effects! The number is incredibly small. So the Experts that provided the advice and the remedies did an incredible job given the circumstances and the level of fear that swept the world. Sam included. I found Lex’s comment that with the internet people are capable of doing their own research laughable. As Sam said, would you want one of those people who are internet experts flying the plane your in or operating on your loved one or deciding whose right and whose wrong when it come to public health policy….. no thanks.
I agree with Sam in many ways, however, average people don't mind when an expert proves another expert wrong. With that being said, we care deeply when we're the ones disproving the "experts" Edit: It appears that some people interpreted this statement as me stating that those who lack education within a particular expertise are more knowledgeable than people who have dedicated their life to it. This is not what I'm saying. What I'm actually saying is that many within the "expert class" were either distrusted due to inconsistent messaging, a build-up of discovered lies, lack of compliance in following their own guidelines, etc. This distrust led to many in society to blatantly go against the message the experts continued preaching, and in doing so, be proven correct with time as the lies continued to flood society, only to be found false at a later date. Many skeptics didn't have to understand the scientific research to know they're being lied to, they simply had to know about the lack of integrity associated with experts at that time and make a decision from there. Hopefully, that'll allow the narcissistic types to keep their ego intact and continue feeling that they're some form of super intelligence comparatively speaking 🙄
Unfortunately I've lost trust in experts and institutions when it comes to governmental things. As far as I can see they don't have the general publics best interest in mind
The part Sam didn't go into, and I really wish he had, is that you can't really trust any single expert. He mentioned getting a second or third opinion, but he didn't highlight that really you want an Nth opinion - you want to aggregate all the expert opinions and then judge accordingly. What this means, in practice, is that you have to look to the expert aggregators, which are the academic and governmental entities such as the WHO and many health departments of states/provinces, hospitals/universities, and developed countries. You're right that there's not a lot of consensus and these groups certainly won't always be right, but that doesn't change the fact that the aggregate expert opinion is going to be a much BETTER bet for literally any layperson than choosing a small group that says things they like hearing.
@@EpsilonAJS i agree with you completely up until the last sentence. And the reason is because - in medicine - treatments have NEVER been so binary. Medicines and therapeutics are nuanced. Different people need different treatments. 20 year olds don’t need cholesterol medicines like an 80 year old woman does. The authoritative bodies - CDC, WHO, FDA - should’ve allowed that nuance, because I think the laypeople are good enough to understand it.
There has been a majority consensus. Is just the classic issue of a loud minority that keeps these issues circulating. Anti vaxers will discard 10 experts to support 1 conspiracist with no real credentials.
90% of doctors in my town agree with taking the shot. Even today with some side effects. 95 % of global scientists believe in global change. It’s pretty obvious.
I was s diehard Harris fan but there was always one thing that gnawed at me and ultimately steered me away from Atheism, it was how he would paint the most simplistic picture of religious people. He just did the same thing in explaining what “non experts” were doing or saying or believing or reading about covid. “Non experts reading things on the Internet think they know more than experts” is not what was happening
You've almost got it. It was non experts reading things on the Internet, thinking they know more than the experts AND connecting with each other in a delusional cloud of confirmation bias.
@@usquebaugh1 Oh yeah, the experts did a peachy job over the past 3 years, our world was saved. Just 15 days to flatten the curve they said..... It was easier to fool you than it will be to convince you that you've been fooled. You were sleepy the whole time, that's why you wrote this response, nobody sound of mind who witnessed everything would believe the official narrative. What happened to all of those asymptomatic spreaders who felt like a million bucks, walking around killing grandma while feeling like a champion? You people crack me up, thank you for this
One way to avoid the paradox of expertise is to cultivate new knowledge, drawing inspiration from other industries and collective insights. Leaders who neglect to be learners plateau. The best leaders are almost always insatiable learners. Jason Beans
While he danced around the topic quite a bit, it seems like Sam Harris was saying we should trust the experts that are selected for us by the ruling political party and/or the traditional media, and those with conflicting opinions, even if they are highly qualified on the subject, are folks we should be skeptical of in general. An odd take because he so often talks about these selected experts having bad incentives.
Expertise as a airplane pilot is quite different than the experts intelectuals like Sam. Dealing with abstract ideas and public policy is not the same as dealing with real world verifiable skills. I can trust that the pilot really knows what hes doing because i can see if the plane if flying correctly, but its much easier to hide incompetence when talking world politics. Most "geopolitical experts" failed to predict the fall of the URSS for example. Its very easy to rationalize bad ideas or incompetence when dealing with abstractions. Also, a pilot usualy do not claim to be an expert in other fields while public intelectuals are always steping outside their field of expertise and using the "we are at 30 thousand feet" (fearmongering) justification to rationalize as to why its okay to give them POLITICAL power. Nobody would know who Noam Chomsky is had he stayed within linquistics, he became famous for talking about politics which he clearly knows nothing about. It just so happens that he's good with words so he hides behind his verbal virtuosity. Another problem is that even if the experts are right, why should we just bown down and do as they say? For example, just because an expert scientist can prove with 100% of certainty that climate change is a real problem and "we're all going to die in 10 years" why should we imediatly do what he says ? At the very least we should discuss alternatives. Its perfectly valid to question not only if they are correct but also alternative solutions. Intelectuals like Sam ALWAYS want to bypass public discussions by claiming the moral high ground based on technical expertise. They conflate real expertise with shady snake oil expertise and then use fearmongering to shut down public debate, just to gain poltical power.
Discuss alternatives with how many people? A thousand, a million? That at some point you have to depend on trained minds. Chomsky is entitled to his political opinions, I don’t want him in charge of vaccine development, just as I don’t want Bret Weinstein in charge. Sam makes sense.
This wasn't a matter of experts but simple logic. Since the beginning, we were told covid was extremely contagious, and that you could have no symptoms and pass it on, or you could have very serious symptoms. Therefore, if people could have no symptoms, or just have light cold symptoms, the data they collected with hystrionic testing was absolutely flawed. When we look at the data from sewage none of the social distancing or mask did anything. The vaccines didn't help either. But all those things brought harm, maybe the vaccines brought the least harm, the social harms will last for a decade.
Lex throws in some of the best and the most (to the point)counter points I have seen any interviewer ask. I learn a lot from his listening style and his questions.
He never claimed to be an expert for Covid for example. His thoughts on the topic are still coherent and follow the overwhelming majority of the scientists.
@I. C. Wiener overwhelming numbers of church members thought the sun revolved around the earth in 16th century. Why? Does sam speak truth to power or power to truth?
@@trystdodge6177 first of all the church aren't scientist. But even ignoring that fact, it goes to show that you don't understand science and how science works. Scientist can be wrong. Even the majority of scientists can be wrong. Science evolves it's part of the game. This does not mean people like Brett Weinstein are right. It takes a bit more than a badly written paper or study to change the current dominant opinion.
He says so himself. He's more of a philosopher, not a practicing neuroscientist. Something else he is though, is quite good at explaining his perspective with logic and reason
And to further prove Sam's point on experts in Oncology - even oncologists will, at times, seek out the 2nd opinion of those with more expertise than themselves. There is a chain of expertise in most fields. All electricians have done their Journey Men placements to learn from other more experienced Electirians until they have worked long enough to provide safe reliable practises.
It's one thing to be able to read, it's another to process it After processing the information can you fact check that info. After fact checking it are you able to ignore your bias on the information you have processed and fact checked Now 5 , 10 , 20 years later does the information now available continue the same path or do you adjust. This last one is sometimes the most difficult and problematic step to deal with.
In the end his best argument is one of authority. Regardless, he's quick to dismiss experts with credentials just because they smell fishy. For Sam, anything that doesn't fit in the dominant narrative is fishy or conspiratory
Wow Donald Trump really did break Sam Harris’s brain. He can’t go 3 minutes without talking about Trump. Even when he’s not talking about him, he’s thinking about the Donald you can see it in his eyes
The blind trust many have in the establishment figures is only outdone by the blind trust just as many have in a doctor who appears on Joe Rogans podcast.
When analysing contributions of experts you have to control for: Biases Blind spots Middle men noise Politics Uncertainties presented as certainties With airplane pilots all those who were affected by any of these above are dead, the consequences are disastrous and people at fault cannot hide behind the complexity. With more complex issues like health, the signal to noise analysis of their contribution is more complex. If you can’t control for the above contaminants, how can you say for sure that the contribution you get is not the opposite of the truth. That is our challenge as a society, since we do need experts.
@@jumpinjohnnyruss listen to the whole podcast. He said he's not going to because he doesn't think it's necessary. He's making decisions for himself instead of following leadership the way he said everyone should.
I think a lot of the initial advice from experts on the virus was straightforward and rational. Remember 6 feet, 15 minutes, and enclosed spaces? Also, the 1% fatality rate and high risk demographics. Work from home if you can. It’s seems that so many nefarious authorities took the opportunity to exploit our fears. Why was it so politically correct to listen to the experts and then take everything 3 steps further? Then when experts say it’s ok now, it’s still not ok. We can listen and then it’s simply personal choice after that.
These experts and their Allie’s during COVID were wrong; they knew they were wrong; and they deliberately silenced and censored debate or criticism. If that doesn’t cause Sam to reevaluate, then I don’t know what else will.
@@shanehackett4683 Everything. For example: at first, masks were only for doctors, then everybody had to wear them. Then they didnt work at all. Then they did again. Then it was better if we wore two masks. Then they didnt work again, and we are still at that point...for now. They are talking about another "variant" now that the 2024 election season is nearing, so the masks will come back, along with the lockdowns they admitted were an absolute failure and did more damage than good, especially to children. And this is on top of many doctors having to admit that they knowingly misdiagnosed a ton of covid cases to get more emergency grant money from the government. The whole thing was blown out of proportion to the point that if nobody said anything about covid, nobody would have noticed anything was wrong as everybody would just see it as, MAYBE, a slightly bad flu season. This whole fiasco should be seen for what it is: A crime against Humanity. Especially now that a plethora of people were basically forced to take an experimental chemical that caused a massive uptick in "sudden adult death syndrome" cases. Must be a huuuuuge coincidence that something that was extremely rare suddenly became somewhat common, especially in otherwise perfectly healthy individuals, or even athletes. Lots of people dying at a young age for weird reasons that dont fit their age bracket. But all were vaccinated...hmm.
One of the fundamental problems with the world is that even people that understand fallacies like the Dunning-Kruger Effect never think the bias applies to themselves.
I think ppl have been naturally selected for a certain amount of irrational behavior as an adaptive mechanism. I wonder if any cognitive biases are possible to circumvent. It seems that by definition, it's unlikely at best and impossible at worst. Perception - filters / cognition - observation - more biased cognition - reaction.
I think Lex is killing it as a legit up and coming interviewer...he reminds me a lot of Jon Stewart. He's not combative, interjects humor, and has obviously taken the time to research and learn about his guests so that he can ask good questions and challenge the guest politely when needed. It's nice to see an interviewer who isn't spineless. Someone who can be respectful...but say "hey, I'm going to need you to quantify that last statement...because I think that was nonsense." Harris has fallen into the trap that a lot of very intelligent people find themselves in. He's so smart and good at rationalizing that I honestly believe he doesn't get how bad some of his lines of logic sound. He's become amazing at convincing himself that he's right simply because he's smart. Most universities obviously don't care about the quality of the minds that they're giving degrees to...and they do an equally terrible job at policing their own staff. We have a country filled to the brim with "D" students that have Bachelor's degrees in hard science fields...who now believe that they're equipped to talk over other people and be listened to as "experts". The reality is that all most colleges are concerned with now is vacuuming up money as fast as banks can issue student loans to teenagers who have no business being in college in the first place. I mean, by Sam's own line of logic...his opinion on anything Covid related should be mute silence.
“Place no head above your own.” The Buddha what does this mean? you are the master of your own destiny and you are accountable for what you do and what you choose to believe. The "experts" can say whatever they want but the last word is on you. No one can supersede what your inner subjective experiential reality is. what people don't like about experts is the sense of superiority that is attached to the word, a lot of the so-called experts come from the energy of pride they see themselves as superior to the non-experts and this is why people despise them, when they come from humility it becomes a completely different story. So is not the experts that people don't like is the sense of superiority that some of them have.
People are quick to dismiss experts precisely because they have no idea how much effort is needed to develop expertise in any topic. If they were aware of this, the comment section of many UA-cam videos would be empty.
If you know anything about the scientific world it has a terrible problem of ego's and stubbornness. Its because of how much effort they put in their field they think they can never be wrong. Any dissenting opinion is laughed at until years later when it turns out to be true they give up defending their ideas and act like nothing happened. This is especially true in the medical field.
@@bumpin0 Doctors will persuade people to go through surgery to get money out of them... same with lawyers, contractors, technicians. People will do what benefits them. Scientists are still humans with the same flaws. What you say about egos is so on point.
@@bumpin0 I know the world of academia quite well. Academia and its vices do not define science. Whether an idea is immediately accepted or dismissed within the academic community is pretty much irrelevant, but some individuals love to complaint as if they are entitled to have their contributions accepted as self-evident. However, science does not work that way; it should be difficult to persuade others that you are correct and upend decades of conventional wisdom. That's a feature, not a bug.
@@rsmith31416 That's the problem with anything new that happens. Covid was the biggest example of of the flaws of the medical/scientific and governmental structures. After all the confusion about the virus it took only about 6 months to know what we know now. Masks didn't really work unless properly used N95, vaccines didn't stop the spread of the virus, the virus most likely leaked from a lab which is important if you don't want another pandemic, lockdowns were completely useless unless you actually locked people in their houses like china did, you could treat covid with certain drugs like monoclonal antibodies and steroids. Even though all that information was known its took those communities over 2 years to admit they fucked up and change policies. And because of how badly those communities messed up if we ever have an actually serious pandemic it will probably kill millions of more people with the lack of trust and obedience.
Oddly enough, the clip channel actually have more people debating and actually paying attention to the podcast, while the main channel is mostly people acting like bots.
@@ayurvology3334 Glad I'm not the only one that noticed that. Lex does a great job pushing back on Sam's talking points then just letting him put his own foot in his mouth. The amount of times he contradicted himself was astounding. Sometimes even in the same sentence. He's so smart he can convince himself he's right about anything. It's actually kind of impressive.
The full episode had a lot of people praising the fact that the conversation happened and praising both of them. The clips had people arguing each individual points. That's how it usually works in my experience. I rarely comment on a full episode unless I put a time stamp to make clear what part of the conversation I'm talking about. Clips are more suited for debate and exchange of ideas between viewers in my opinion.
Using the plane in a storm analogy, if I was on the plane it was because I chose to take that flight and accepted that if we encountered a storm that I would want the pilot to handle it. With Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates here in Melbourne Australia, I was forced onto the 'plane' and made to let a 'pilot' control how I responded to Covid whether I believed in their expertise or not. There were other 'pilots' in other countries e.g. Sweden who had different strategies, but most of these people were maligned and anyone who supported them was marginalised in their community.
Yes, so the best course of action is to shoot down the pilot? Sounds reasonable. Or maybe not. Maybe the best thing to do is to support the pilot, so at least you land safely. Only THEN can you request that the pilot be fired.
@@fixups6536 No one forces me to get on a plane when I choose to fly. I make my own risk/reward analysis. The government on the other hand put a gun to my head and forced me on the plane. That's what Sam Harris just doesn't get. I don't care how much of an 'expert' someone is, that's not a tool to use to rule me. Share your expertise with me and I will make my own decision.
@@dennismenace4188 You live in a country. You have a government. We all have. We are all on some plane already. Next time it happens, do we support the pilot, or do we try to open all exit doors and take down the plane in the process? I sure wish we work to be better prepared for the next time it happens, because it will happen again. Your opinion certainly matters, as it is clear that it has been a painful experience for you, and it has been for me too. I do hear you, and we have to think about it and be better prepared.
@@fixups6536 the only thing we have to be prepared for in this lifetime if it happens again is complete and utter violence towards the morons that think they have any say over our bodily autonomy.
@@fixups6536 You are so naive, your understanding of the world is that of an ignorant child. You're dangerous to yourself and society at large because you make poor decisions as a result of fear. Humans who act out of fear always, always cause destruction and disintegrate the social fabric of society.
If you can provide proof from high-quality sources like peer-reviewed papers and articles from academic institutions then that's one thing. If your expert's sources are some version of "trust me, it's obvious what they're doing" or "I read this thing last week" then it's not on the same level of credibility. Ultimately there are no such thing as infallible heroes - EVERYONE gets it wrong sometimes - but a) objectively verifiable facts do exist outside of opinion and they decide truth and b) education and experience reduce the chance you're way off.
@@ColinGrym I completely agree. However , folks like Sam Harris will label someone a quack if he doesn't agree with the other person's point of view. There were many "experts" with a completely different point of view. Try the Great Barrington Declaration. Additionally, why (although I may know) isn't there a committee composed of many experts in matters of such magnitude.
Sams example of a pilot is very off the mark in comparison to bankers, economists, politicians, virologists etc who have most lately benefitted from the extreme fuck ups that tgey have visited upon society in recent years. A pilot has the same vested interest as the passengers - to land safely, All those other experts do not, and often benefit despite what happens to Joe Public
This argument makes no sense because there's no reason to think a layman is more trustworthy than an expert in addition to them being less informed than an expert. So for any given level of distrust, expertise is more valuable more than ignorance on a subject assuming there is equal evidence for lack of integrity for individual experts and individual laymen.
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker." ~ Mikhail Bakunin
Sam Harris is an expert on the philosophical belief that religious books are not literally true. Personally I find that pretty basic and self evident and think debating clergymen on such matters is a waste of time
Any expert on clinical depression would instruct people to look into their family histories for clinical depression, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, etc. Genetics plays a significant role when a have teen or twentysomething who has everything going for them, on paper, but they're still feeling down and unusually anxious most of the time, in spite of all the good traits they exhibit, their high potential or the good circumstances they may have.
Interesting intelligent discussion, but a main topic is missing! I discover this on a personal level. As a real estate broker, on occasion I would have to stop my rig and walk around to settle down. I called a doctor friend and he said my hypertension is fairly common and smart to take a break. I search the internet several days and discovered Dr Gundry. He retired as a world heart surgeon to start a program restricting what you eat and drink on his UA-cam segments. On his diet for 10 years and feel excellent at 81. Hypertension disappeared immediately.
Experts exist... you should listen to them... but they often have no idea what they're talking about and you shouldn't listen to anyone who has ideas outside of them because they don't have the credentials... got it.
If that's what you took from Sam on this you have much bigger problems than whether you should listen to experts. You need to work on basic understanding of rational concepts from the base level.
So as I read it your conclusion is that education and experience don't render someone infallible, especially in complex situation like a novel virus causing meaningful harm. As a result of that uncertainty even amongst experts, knowledge no longer matters and every opinion is equally as valid. Maybe we should apply that approach to other fields of science - perhaps we'd have fusion power by now if we asked the general public to throw in their takes on how nuclear reactors should be constructed. Dude, not all opinions are suddenly rendered equally worthwhile simply because the problem is difficult.
@@ColinGrym That is absolutely correct. The more difficult, unpredictable and new the problem, the more we should leave it to the people who understand and have been practicing the field for a long time. The idea that anyone in the know is lying because someone is paying them to do so is the real virus that will cause our destruction. If one really wants to believe in conspiracy theories, it is best to think about who might actually be conspiring against us. Could it be that a hostile foreign country wants us to believe that experts in our own country are lying to us? Who are we serving by casting doubt on the reputation of people who have spent their lives working in a field vital to our survival?
@@ColinGrym I don’t think anyone is saying don’t listen to experts. I think people are saying take in a healthy amount of skepticism. It really wasn’t the experts that were getting things wrong. It was the media spinning a narrative that wasn’t true. They likely distorted expert info. So on one hand, the experts were giving out pretty great information, as quickly as they could. The decisions made with that info I think is what people became upset with. From what I have seen is that neither side truly understands each others position. So they try to rationalize the other sides position (usual in an unflattering way) so they can be correct against them.
The issue is that the opinions of experts is colored by too many other factors, from narcissism, self absorption, to true conflicts of interest where they realize money or prestige is being left on the table if they choose option A, so instead they go for option B just like anyone else because they are not on the same airplane as us and don't give two shits whether we are able to land the plane in a storm, to use his example. They booked a very different flight from the get go, and those tickets are rarely available to the rest of us.
Except what we're dealing with is more analogous of one pilot attending an expensive flight school while the other paid for lessons. Both trained with the same information and equipment but one has networking and developed their career through the establishment.
No. What we’re dealing with is one guy who MAYBE took a lesson once, or who maybe was REALLY GREAT at flight simulator games thinking he knows better than an actual pilot with thousands of hours of logged flight time and training with real airplanes. THAT is what is going on nowadays
Thank you Lex for your work, and for the 20 seconds of silence you add at the end of your clips, which allow me to pause the video while I'm still absorbing the wise words just spoken, before some desperate ugly obnoxious guy blows my ears off with a crypto-BS UA-cam commercial.
Hate this guy. He’s every bit of the problem with society. In short, everything he says is he wants you (all of us) to be submissive and for him and people like him to be in control.
Pretty interesting conversation. I have to side with Sam on this one. Lex suggests everyone can do their own research, but to do that they would need to be perfectly rational, have some degree of scientific literacy and media literacy. This is not the case! Sure lex is all of these, but the average person is not. They will let their confirmation bias lead them and sometimes to really bad conclusions. One top of the fact that our politics are to some degree broken and the truth has become tribal. We could have probably saved 300K lives just in the US. Doing your own research in this case was catastrophic. On top of that, there are a ton of charlatans out there that the layman can’t disprove because they don’t know what questions to ask.
Most people trusted the experts early on in the pandemic. Now even Sam says he is hesitant to take more shots, despite the recommendation to take them from the experts at the government say we should do, to us and our kids. This is all there is to say about that.
How do you know they lied? Did some other "experts" tell you that? This is why we're in a post-truth society; people just claim shit and people believe or disbelieve based on political alignment instead of having the humility to realize when they shouldn't have an opinion at all.
He admits that some experts lie, and he puts this in perspective: this is not the case in general, and if we take the fact that an expert has lied (or simply screwed up) as the general case for advocating that we should not listen to experts, then we are going in the wrong direction and will regress. It is good to keep in mind that one expert can be wrong, but it is probably not wise to extrapolate from this that all experts are worthless. It's a matter common sense.
@@EpsilonAJS You're asleep if you haven't noticed the lies. Where would you like to start? Collins/Fauci email scandal. PV videos - cherry health, Pfizer exec admitting altering the virus. Walensky unable to answer a single question in Congress. The unscientific mandates. The lie of 15 days to flatten the curve turning into 3 jabs to keep your job, and start scanning qr codes to get into everywhere. Censorship en masse. UA-cam removed the dislike button because everyone was downvoting all of the propaganda. I haven't even started, I can go on for hours about the lies. Haven't even begun talking about China. What reality have you been living in? Do you believe in all state media? Do you believe in Russian/ Chinese media? What do you/ don't you believe in, and why?
Lex has surprised me in his interview with Sam. I don't understand how Lex doesn't see the logic and sound advice of Sam. I always thought he would listen to Joe Rogan's conspiracy theories simply because they are friends but didn't actually buy into them. I am now under the impression I was wrong, Lex actually believes them. I've lost some respect for Lex. I really thought he was smart enough to avoid rabbit holes.
I agree, doesn’t matter what Sam could say, it’s always “but what if “. It’s like Neil Tyson on Rogan, rogan mentions that we don’t know a lot about gravity, Tyson shuts him down immediately and says something like , “I’m okay with the information we have about gravity, sometimes you have to move on and not dwell on it”
I sympathize with the honest, competent and good faith experts, because unlike themthere are a LOT that aren't operating in a similar good faith manner and are singlehandedly destroying the trust that people used to have in them. The problem is that presently it seems like it's the bad faith experts that have the microphone, so to speak. What's worse is that a lot of the honest and knowledgeable ones are getting actively silenced by the others, and those others seem to be working hand in hand with the other shitheads from other fields and disciplines: medicine, journalism, academia, etc.I'm a history geek, especially ancient history and more specifically Roman history from around the third-forth century BCE-beginning of the third CE, but I am NOT an expert. I went to college with the goal of working in Classical studies, but for reasons irrelevant to this comment, I didn't finish. I was listening to a ancient history podcast a week or two ago that was doing an episode on the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. Severus is one of those emperor's that falls in the era where my knowledge starts to wane, but I'm still familiar enough with him; his rule and his sons. They had an expert on who had been on the show before in what had been there most popular episode, so I was looking forward to it. Within the first few minutes of talking about the subject, this expert says "Severus was black, he was from North Africa. Let me repeat that: he was a black Roman emperor." That was the moment I realized "shit, they're right: they really ARE ruining academia." Severus was most certainly not a black man. I'm not going to make the "there's a difference between Africa and sub-Saharan Africa," argument that's usually used in these debates, though it is a mostly solid one: Egypt, Afghanistan and Lybia are in North Africa, and I don't know anyone who would consider them black. There were some people in N Africa at the time, like some Berbers that could be considered black, but it's irrelevant. Severus could have been born in the heart of the Congo and he still wouldn't be black: his father was Carthaginian, and Carthaginians were descended from Phoenicians.Phoenicians were a semetic ethnicity group, like ancient Israelites and Arabs. Severus' mother was Italic, and as Roman as one could possibly be. I don't mean Roman as in "you're born in Gaul in 100CE, therefore your a Roman." I mean her family were Patricians (a group that were few and far in between by this point in history. Her being patrician means that, with the exception of the Claudii, her family traces itself all the way back to the days before the Republic, when Rome was ruled by a king. A era that Julius Caesar would have considered ancient, around the seventh or eighth century BCE. In the spirit of transparency I'll freely almost that along with the label of historian, I am also not a geneticist or anthropologist. That said, last I checked "Arab+Western European" does not equal black. Beyond that there are plenty of other things that can be cited to counter his assertion. My problem isn't whether Severus is black or white; it's incidental, my problem is this "expert." You don't need to be an expert to know the information I just laid out; a quick Google search can bring you to the relevant information, and yet this gentleman seemed to be wholly ignorant of it. This…guest on the podcast is supposed to be an expert while I am nothing of the kind. Maybe this is just my puny brain and it's limited functionality missing something that a more intelligent person might see 🥴(that's my simpleton face, you like?), but as far as I can tell this comes down to one of two scenarios; either A) this guy was unaware of these particular facts, or B) he was well aware of them but was being duplicitous and ignoring them in order to tell a different story, one the he felt was a better one to tell us. Since I find it extremely difficult to believe that he didn't know these things, I'd have to do with scenario B. The implications are as infuriating to me as they are legion (pun intended). This is a historian, an educator. His job is to teach people things about the world that they aren't yet aware of, and this is a huge responsibility. Just the contempt alone that he must hold for the rest of us is a thing to behold. Apparently he doesn't think the rest of us are worthy or capable of possessing the knowledge that he holds. Instead, similar to how a parent may tell a young child that their dog that died went to live on a farm so as to not rattle our innocent and fragile selves, he makes up a story he feels is more palatable. THIS, Sam Harris; this is why people hold experts in such low regard. *I wrote this in the comment block in the UA-cam app on my phone. I haven't even gone back to proofread it, but I know it's going to be insufferably long. My apologies.😅 Edit: Jesus Christ Sam. "In good times 'doing your own research,' is a waste of time." Seriously? You really believe that? Well, the implications of that statement are as bad as the ones of the historian. I ENJOY doing my own research, I love learning new things and especially love it when I learn that something I thought to be true wasn't, and I come away with more knowledge. I honestly don't know if he's just saying this as a poorly thought out argument, because in spite of his "I'm not saying" caveat, he in fact is telling people to blindly listen to experts. I can't watch anymore interviews with him, I just lose more and more respect for him in his field of study, but even more as a person. He is doing himself no favors coming onto these shows. Someone needs to stage an intervention to get him to shut up, at least for a few months.
Yeah, its insane how so many are lapping up what Sam is saying without actually listening to WHAT he is saying. Dudes an authoritarian nutball that disguises his bad intentions with a calm demeanor. People arnt listening to what he is saying, just how he is saying it. Its like being hypnotized into doing something terrible...with a smile on your face. And most of these people dont realize it.
There's a significant amount of experts whose voices are completely silenced. There should be a dialogue between experts not a unilateral push to amplify experts who aren't even willing to be questioned by others
Why. That would only complicate things. There is only one science, nothing to be questioned. One who owns the data owns the gold. Science is science. Data is data. Data is the new gold. Preferably it is not to have data and just to say that you have data. And truly there is no data. Situation was so COMPLEX that in reality you could not have data. It was presumptuous to tell that by looking at the 'data' you knew what to do like you could read the future and what your action will do. What happened to all those 2020 ventilators. Only one data you could trust, that is a stock market. You just needed to concentrate on pushing a defective product and laugh all the way to the bank.
No one does their own research, and that's not what this conversation is about. Doing your own research would be setting up and executing your own study. If you're not doing that, then you're deferring to someone else. This entire conversation, then, isn't about whether or not you should trust experts, but how you choose which experts to trust. That's a matter of their motives, claims, and evidence. This conversation seems to miss the point entirely. Lex even says that maybe you can trust "real" experts, but not the "communicators" right after saying it's easy to do your own research and read meta analyses and "blog posts" about those metaanalyses. My man, those two things are the same.
What about humility? There is good and bad information out there. And there are also outright lies. When someone spends hours on the internet doing what they call research, often they do not know the validity of the sources they are using, only that it agrees or disagrees with their own opinion and it's natural to follow what makes sense. This can be a massive mistake.
There in fact is a clear defintion of expertise: "a high level of domain-specific knowledge and skills accumulated with age or experience". experts are practiced people who have on-the-order-of 1000 hours of experience applying what they know to both regular and rare problems. Dr Harris is conflating certified professionals, media-proclaimed personalities and other individuals who went confirmation-bias-shopping on google all as experts. They're not.
He specifically made the distinction between experts and communicators. Experts are those with 1000+ hours of work on a topic whereas communicators are politicians and news people, some of who have a non-scientific agenda.
@@therantingboy his point was experts are experts are experts. Non-experts can’t have an opinion. Sam has more in him and it was clear he was only trying to talk down criticisms of experts, because they are experts while barely allowing the acknowledgment that the allowed consensus on Covid was wrong a fair amount. He also shunned non-expert research.
Sam Harris is the perfect example of his own metaphor that he made fun of...... he muses about the airplane at thirty thousand feet and some random guy walks into the cockpit and says he has some new ideas about how to fly the plane. Sam Harris "PRECISELY" did that exact thing a few decades ago when he wasn't even a successful neuroscientist at all and then decided he'd burst into the cockpit of professional Philosophy circles and started telling lies and pretending he could talk about the philosophy of free will while screwing it up and making logical fallacies and being a bull in a china-closet. He makes no sense, he made no impact, he never provided any helpful clarification on anything and never resolved any problem....he just made more problems, and made a fool out of himself. And professional philosophers now admit that he did such, and have sent him back to strap himself into his chair and shut up from now on.
Fun fact neuroscience is not actually a scientific discipline. It's a sub discipline of psychology and 99% of professors who teach neuroscience grad students are psychology PhDs and neuroscience has a notorious abysmal record of data replication via experiments...yes I know some psychology departments use scientific tools to get better replication of data but it's not science. Also, Sam is not and has never been a scientist and did some study of methods during grad school...but no neuroscience departments are not expert's in scientific methodology...when I was in grad school I also took 3 courses in methods etc and was part of journal clubs but I certainly laughed at the the neuroscience students most are like Sam... nothing resembling scientist's
Disappointingly medieval. If I need a medical diagnosis, of course I go to a doctor (duh). But when he opines that I have disease X and I ask, "What makes you think so?", the answer I don't want is "I went to Harvard and am certified by agency XYZ." The discussion is about the rules of evidence, not about the fact that some people are right more often than others in their alleged fields of specialization. We have to distinguish between when we are trusting the expert and when they provide transparent reasons for their proclamations. It is fallacy to think that "the public" cannot understand the reasoning behind expert decisions. On any given issue, some members of the public can understand that -- some better than the government appointees -- and some cannot. The secondary responsibility of gov't appointed experts is to make recommendations and rulings; their primary responsibility is to use the resources and expertise at their disposal to gather and present evidence to facilitate the public discourse among other experts. But that is not what witchdoctor Fauci did, is it?
Second and third opinions were not allowed during the pandemic. That’s the problem. Legitimate experts were shadow banned or threatened with loss of jobs. California passed a law saying experts couldn’t give their expert opinions if they contradicted the consensus…
There's an unfortunate subtext to the idea Sam Harris brings up regarding relying on experts. It's not just a matter of trusting experts, it's a matter of trusting the curators who are bringing those experts to the public's attention, and also trusting the experts not to tailor the truth with lies designed for safe public consumption. There's a very strong ethos floating around, and one that Sam Harris himself holds, that people can't be trusted to hear dangerous ideas. So why should we trust an expert who holds this view that is not compatible with a forthright communication of all the facts? People didn't suddenly go crazy and start seeking out more and more fringe philosophies, they simply continue to be let down by proponents of this belief that truth should be evaluated based on the amount of damage you can presume it might cause, and this applies more than ever in politically contentious discourse.
CIA; The Paradox of Expertise: the strengths of expertise can also be weaknesses. Although one would expect experts to be good forecasters, they are not particularly good at making predictions about the future.
When becoming an 'expert' in anything means submitting to a malevolent political ideology, you can't expect people to take them seriously. The classification of 'expertise' is corrupted, and people are responding appropriately.
Political ideology exists everywhere, you yourself might have gotten to where you are at because someone manipulated your political and social grievances
You absolutely should do your own research, as long as you can distinguish fact from fiction. What's the point of doing research if it's just to pick and choose your "truths" to confirm your own bias? That was the problem with the MAGA cult; they would do their "research" on right-wing sites only, that was just full of verifiably false information or conspiracies based on zero evidence or science. This is when one should defer to experts, to confirm their own research, not simply to re-enforce their already held beliefs with bs.
Knowledge from the Internet? There is importance in systematic knowledge, when you go to study in school of higher education you will not take a course on Genetics if you did not take a course on Microbiology, you will not take a course on Biochemistry if you did not take a course on Organic Chemistry, you will not take a course on Differential Geometry if you did not take courses in Calculus. And even in those very courses you will have to follow organized system from the beginning. So, no you will NOT become a science expert surfing internet on your own no matter how much you wish to avoid the hard systematic work. Lazy people do not know anything other than their own opinions.
Thanks Lex learned a lot here. Sam explains his thoughts on things so throughly and reasonably it’s hard to intellectually or intelligently disagree with him but you’ve shown me a different angle. Well done sir.
Trust the experts. Trust me on this, I am an expert. I might be wrong, sometimes, but in those cases, if things were different I’d be right. So, you see, I am always right. And surely I don’t need to debate Brett Weinstein: I can simply go everywhere and talk s@&t about him. Every time I do I feel so righteous, no need to face him.
Expertise is not a consensus. Galileo was an expert. Consensus is vulnerable to status motivations. The anti covid vax anti lockdown crowd listened to Galileo.
There's nothing when experts or scientists are wrong, it is a problem when they claim certainty when they are not, and then refuse to admit they were wrong and explain why.
Experts & Scientist`s need to eat . See where their money comes from &you`ll see where their opinion goes. Covid has fleshed that out for us now hasn`t it
Something I have noticed is that when it comes to serious, time-sensitive topics, telling the general public to "do your own research" actually dilutes whatever truth is already there because then you flood the information market with incorrect information. It's becoming a problem more and more because humanity's problems that need to be solved, in order to endure as a species, requires super specialized knowledge that takes a decade at minimum in order to comprehend it enough to know how to deal with an emergency related to their area of expertise.
The problem is you'll always have one group saying "X said it's so and so" and the other group saying "Y said it's actually so and so". Both groups have their experts, both think they're right. What I don't understand is why when 99.9% of the scientists is on the page, you'd trust the 0.1% that says stuff like "take horse dewormer if you get viral infect" lol
Ok but the problem with trusting the government with serious time-sensitive topics is the government doesn't have our best interests in mind and almost always (always?) makes the absolute worst decision imaginable no matter what the problem is, usually after the government themselves have created the problem by implementing the worst possible solution to a previous problem that was also created by the government. Like Sadiq's ULEZ bullshit. It's designed to clean up the environment, tackle climate change and so kids with asthma can breathe better in busy cities with lots of traffic. Except it doesn't do any of those things. It doesn't reduce the amount of cars in cities, it just makes the people who have to drive in cities pay an extra fee for the privilege.
reading blog posts is not "doing research". reading "meta-analysis" is not "doing research". watching youtube videos is not "doing research". the fact that lex seems to think it is makes a lot of sense.
People keep saying (stay in your lane) you people do realize that this is not how language works correct? The tools needed to decode data are English and mathematics and if you possess both and understand what a logical fallacy is then you yourself can decode any data in front of your face...you people are all trying to tell people they don't understand the language and I'm pretty sure it's just because YOU DONT UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE YOU ARE UNEDUCATED...just because you are too lazy or incapable to be a polymath does not mean they do not exist or are not the goal where intelligence is concerned. "I'm not saying blindly follow authority just follow the 97%" yeah that's nonsense didn't need any fancy specialization to figure that out.
Hasn't the saga of String Theory been a case study on how expertise can both fail, and how mistakes or failed hopes or projections can turn even some of the brightest people in the world into at best blind fools, or at worst unrepentant liars? Sam's earlier point is important. Yes experts can be wrong and layman can be right. Sure we all agree. But experts get it right most of the time, at least compared to layman. Still, absolutely true. But what happens to experts when the incentive structure changes? Truth is indeed orthogonal to the reputational pedigree of any one person, but trustworthiness is on a separate axis as well. If we are talking about mistakes, or the rate of factual error, betting on expertise is the most consistent and safe method. But does expertise add any trustworthiness? When we leave the realm of mistakes, and enter the realm of deception, is expertise still a worthwhile parameter to bet on? My answer is yes, but to a much lesser degree. When a person is no longer honest, or no longer objective enough to be honest, the value of their expertise needs to be greatly diminished when we are assessing their opinions.
@@ELL289 He doesn't now and hasn't for a long time written almost anything about neuroscience or done anything related to it, he just has a Ph.D. in it. FWIW I agree with him more than most here, but he's more like a cultural commentator who happens to have a Ph.D. in neuroscience.
@@ELL289 In that case, perhaps he ought to take his own advice, and stay in his lane. His stoic, detached approach, is his undoing. I rarely see Harris smile or express joy, yet he proposes that how we ought to observe this earthly realm. In hoc signo vinces +.
Somewhere along the way arrogance took over and people now resent experts. On Pawn Stars the other day they asked if they could bring in an expert to look at an item and the guy said “He’s not some college puke is he?” 🤦♂️
Full podcast episode: ua-cam.com/video/Qyrjgf-_Vdk/v-deo.html
Lex Fridman podcast channel: ua-cam.com/users/lexfridman
Guest bio: Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, and philosopher.
he choking on bluepills again
woke encroachment into medicine
You forgot neuroscientist.
It's crazy that we're living in a time when it takes so much effort to say that it matters if someone knows what they're talking about...
Glad to see Ben Stiller on the podcast
@@MichaelMcCabe-eb2bo !0, 000 comedians out of work...and you're trying to be funny!
It's not that simple. We also live in a time of unprecedented political influence, and data is easily politicized and corrupted.
@@Alien_Empathy yes i agree. But the point he's arguing is even more basic: just that it matters if someone has knowledge of what they're saying. Even that seems to be to a degree something we don't all quite agree on
@@Alien_Empathy what makes it dangerous is the inability to tell from credible data and mom credible data. The numbers can be manipulated by that takes an educated mind and we keep devaluing academics and gutting the education system. This is just making people dumber faster. We don't even know the questions to ask let alone recognize the information we're looking at when it's presented.
The value of doing your own research on complex issues isn’t to replace the experts, it’s knowing what questions to ask. You can quickly identify what you aren’t being told.
Going on the assumption that the research will fill in enough gaps of information to be able to formulate the questions. As we all know, that isn’t often the case.
That is brilliant.
I think.
You probably gave me the angle I needed for my final work in my epistemology course I'll do on the lab leak covid case.
Thank you.
Far too often people do their own "research" only to the point of finding conflicting information and siding with that. Very few bother to then verify the value of this conflicting information or it's sources because more than likely they would end up coming full circle.
This is why social media was an absolute mess of insane conspiracies during the pandemic.
@@fongdimbulator Or, unless they’ve been rigorously trained-and that’s not a guarantee-confirmation bias is a likely default position.
One thing Sam needs to nail in is the affect of capture on expertise. It’s the biggest issue we face as a society, and the last three years have been a massive wake up call for those who had be previously unaware that this was even possible.
I will listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson when he is talking about Pluto. I will listen to Bill Gates when he is talking about computer operating systems. Stay in your lane and be willing to defend your ideas openly and honestly against criticism and you will be doing your part to restore trust in experts.
So basically you prefer to be spoon fed your narrative by the state sponsored source. Maybe someday you’ll do some actual thinking on your own.
Neil Degrass Tyson on trans issues… “why is it so important to place labels” also Pluto isn’t a planet😜😳🤔. Ultimate stay in your lane
What does Bill Gates know about operating systems other than stealing someone else’s code if I want to learn how to monetize every human being on the planet, then I’ll listen to Bill Gates.
Restore trust? that's impossible when it's politically driven.. there's nothing going on in the right wing media right now, which isn't
I will never forgive Tyson for demoting Pluto. It’s a planet. Don’t @ me.
The "Experts" should be able to provide the data regarding the position they hold, not just lean on credentials
And they always do. Dum dums would just rather rely on that ONE personal anecdote
Providing data, the exact thing the non-experts are not doing
@@shanehackett4683 they absolutely do not. if you actually vetted their data yourself you would know but you don't so you must lean on your trust of their credentials, like a fool.
@@_jow you don’t know what you’re taking about. You don’t even HAVE the knowledge to vet their data. What credentials do you have? None? Okay, I’ll listen to the guy with decades of training and experience instead of some dip on UA-cam
Precisely. You should not believe in anything spouted by experts or scientists who can not supply empirical evidence to back up their claims.
97% of "climate scientists" claim the earth is warming because of human activities. But not one iota of evidence can they show, nor can they give any measureable statistics as to what any of their bunk ideas can achieve in cooling the earth.
If a family member got cancer and you spent the next four years learning as much as you could from as many sources as you could, about cancer, treatments, protocols, outcomes, it won’t make you an oncologist. But you’d be in a pretty darn good space to choose the oncologist you wanted to work with.
I agree 100%. The professional people tend to climb up into bubbles and they think the rest of us cannot wipe our own arse
After working as an engineer, one of the things I've noticed is that people who are really awful and incompetent can still rise to the top of certain institutions. For companies and agencies that have a lot of money, and have dysfunctional leadership, you will see incompetent people rocket to the top. In a poorly run company or agency, most of the competent people leave, and it clears the path for buffoons to reign. Far from being a cutthroat world where your ability to generate a profit determines your fate, I've found that big companies tend to act as corporate welfare for bad engineers and bad managers.
I once worked with a guy that had a great resume, ~10 years experience, fully licensed, and a degree from Berkley... but he was so incompetent, he literally could not design a slab of concrete. I used to wonder if his degree was fake.
However, members of the public could not easily tell that this guy sucked. All his colleagues knew he sucked, other civil engineers knew he sucked, but a member of the public couldn't tell. That is, until they build the slab of concrete he designed. But by then it's too late.
So if I'm checking someone out, I try to see what their peers think of them. If you have someone who is well respected by their peers, or a leader in the industry, that's typically a good sign.
@Havik they think they are smarter, usually they are not. Plenty have good memories and repeat what they have been taught but cannot think critically for themselves, as things progress and we learn more about certain topics these educated people are usually the last to go against what they were trained to think even when it's clearly wrong
@@Unvaccinated69 lol of course your username is 'unvaccinated'
@@wolfumz yeah and? Won't have any spike protein in my brain or heart like you will
It's amazing that Sam can speak so authoritatively on this subject when he completely disregarded world renowned experts that were silenced and was completely wrong. After that, he's admitted that he's okay with those experts being silenced. He actively tried to stop people from talking to competent experts.
If nothing else, Sam has shown that a very smart person can be absolutely incorrect on all fronts when they're needed. He then goes on to show how terrible he is at coming to terms with his failure as a renowned intellectual. He won't admit his failures. He just admits that it was rational to be a failure in that moment. It's fine. His life wasn't ruined. So it's fine. That's a very strange mind trap that he's built for himself.
I don’t believe Sam was wrong. So many people appear to ignore that during Covid the available knowledge kept changing as the situation evolved. There were many “Experts” were making claims like the efficacy of Ivermectin, the value of wearing masks, the danger the new nRNA vaccines. Time has shown that many of these experts were just wrong. Sam’s position during the pandemic was to support the people who were responsible for making public policy and critic people who were promoting an alternate view but had no responsibility for public policy. If there is no consistency of opinion on what to do next then we become paralysed. It became obvious that in our society that some people believe everyone in authority is corrupt and only they know the truth. No amount of “internet research” makes anyone an expert. Most people are so uneducated on a complex topic that they can not properly understand what they are reading or decipher when someone else is promoting thoughts that are not proven. The fact the the death rates dramatically declined in all countries once the vaccinations levels reached over 70% is indisputable evidence that they saved lives. Remember back to before the vaccines when mass graves were being dug all over the world. I challenge anyone to point to any position Sam took and say that it was wrong, when considering what was known and proven to be correct at the time. Easily to have 20/20 vision in hindsight, we all have that. Think about how many vaccines have been administered since 2021 and of those (billions) how many people have had side effects! The number is incredibly small. So the Experts that provided the advice and the remedies did an incredible job given the circumstances and the level of fear that swept the world. Sam included. I found Lex’s comment that with the internet people are capable of doing their own research laughable. As Sam said, would you want one of those people who are internet experts flying the plane your in or operating on your loved one or deciding whose right and whose wrong when it come to public health policy….. no thanks.
What experts?
What are you talking about, what was he wrong about?
Or are you still a victim of covid anti-vax misinformation and various conspiracy theories???
"world renowned"
[citation needed]
the ones i agree with@@karkanrey1463
This didn’t require “experts”. A lot of the bS was 8th grade biology
I agree with Sam in many ways, however, average people don't mind when an expert proves another expert wrong. With that being said, we care deeply when we're the ones disproving the "experts"
Edit: It appears that some people interpreted this statement as me stating that those who lack education within a particular expertise are more knowledgeable than people who have dedicated their life to it. This is not what I'm saying.
What I'm actually saying is that many within the "expert class" were either distrusted due to inconsistent messaging, a build-up of discovered lies, lack of compliance in following their own guidelines, etc. This distrust led to many in society to blatantly go against the message the experts continued preaching, and in doing so, be proven correct with time as the lies continued to flood society, only to be found false at a later date.
Many skeptics didn't have to understand the scientific research to know they're being lied to, they simply had to know about the lack of integrity associated with experts at that time and make a decision from there. Hopefully, that'll allow the narcissistic types to keep their ego intact and continue feeling that they're some form of super intelligence comparatively speaking 🙄
He’s a coward he shit his pants with covid and still looking for excuses why it was right
Found the average person expert.
@thrashish found the Redditor
@@thrashish found the “trust the mainstream narrative” redditor. tRuSt dA eXpuRtS
@@gasstationpeanuts1814 nah bruv. my you tube account is older than yours. If anything, you found your average you tube troll.
Unfortunately I've lost trust in experts and institutions when it comes to governmental things. As far as I can see they don't have the general publics best interest in mind
Sam’s example falls apart on Covid because there’s never been a real scientific consensus on so many issues regarding it
The part Sam didn't go into, and I really wish he had, is that you can't really trust any single expert. He mentioned getting a second or third opinion, but he didn't highlight that really you want an Nth opinion - you want to aggregate all the expert opinions and then judge accordingly. What this means, in practice, is that you have to look to the expert aggregators, which are the academic and governmental entities such as the WHO and many health departments of states/provinces, hospitals/universities, and developed countries. You're right that there's not a lot of consensus and these groups certainly won't always be right, but that doesn't change the fact that the aggregate expert opinion is going to be a much BETTER bet for literally any layperson than choosing a small group that says things they like hearing.
@@EpsilonAJS i agree with you completely up until the last sentence. And the reason is because - in medicine - treatments have NEVER been so binary. Medicines and therapeutics are nuanced. Different people need different treatments. 20 year olds don’t need cholesterol medicines like an 80 year old woman does. The authoritative bodies - CDC, WHO, FDA - should’ve allowed that nuance, because I think the laypeople are good enough to understand it.
There has been a majority consensus. Is just the classic issue of a loud minority that keeps these issues circulating. Anti vaxers will discard 10 experts to support 1 conspiracist with no real credentials.
@@EpsilonAJS
Wow 😂
You and I have been living on a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PLANET over the past 3 years 😂
G_d bless 🙏
90% of doctors in my town agree with taking the shot. Even today with some side effects. 95 % of global scientists believe in global change. It’s pretty obvious.
I was s diehard Harris fan but there was always one thing that gnawed at me and ultimately steered me away from Atheism, it was how he would paint the most simplistic picture of religious people. He just did the same thing in explaining what “non experts” were doing or saying or believing or reading about covid. “Non experts reading things on the Internet think they know more than experts” is not what was happening
You've almost got it. It was non experts reading things on the Internet, thinking they know more than the experts AND connecting with each other in a delusional cloud of confirmation bias.
100% right
@@usquebaugh1 Oh yeah, the experts did a peachy job over the past 3 years, our world was saved.
Just 15 days to flatten the curve they said.....
It was easier to fool you than it will be to convince you that you've been fooled.
You were sleepy the whole time, that's why you wrote this response, nobody sound of mind who witnessed everything would believe the official narrative.
What happened to all of those asymptomatic spreaders who felt like a million bucks, walking around killing grandma while feeling like a champion?
You people crack me up, thank you for this
It’s exactly what was happening. Everyone follows the internet pages to the ones they want to believe. Bad advice.
One way to avoid the paradox of expertise is to cultivate new knowledge, drawing inspiration from other industries and collective insights. Leaders who neglect to be learners plateau. The best leaders are almost always insatiable learners. Jason Beans
While he danced around the topic quite a bit, it seems like Sam Harris was saying we should trust the experts that are selected for us by the ruling political party and/or the traditional media, and those with conflicting opinions, even if they are highly qualified on the subject, are folks we should be skeptical of in general. An odd take because he so often talks about these selected experts having bad incentives.
Expertise as a airplane pilot is quite different than the experts intelectuals like Sam. Dealing with abstract ideas and public policy is not the same as dealing with real world verifiable skills. I can trust that the pilot really knows what hes doing because i can see if the plane if flying correctly, but its much easier to hide incompetence when talking world politics. Most "geopolitical experts" failed to predict the fall of the URSS for example. Its very easy to rationalize bad ideas or incompetence when dealing with abstractions.
Also, a pilot usualy do not claim to be an expert in other fields while public intelectuals are always steping outside their field of expertise and using the "we are at 30 thousand feet" (fearmongering) justification to rationalize as to why its okay to give them POLITICAL power. Nobody would know who Noam Chomsky is had he stayed within linquistics, he became famous for talking about politics which he clearly knows nothing about. It just so happens that he's good with words so he hides behind his verbal virtuosity.
Another problem is that even if the experts are right, why should we just bown down and do as they say? For example, just because an expert scientist can prove with 100% of certainty that climate change is a real problem and "we're all going to die in 10 years" why should we imediatly do what he says ? At the very least we should discuss alternatives. Its perfectly valid to question not only if they are correct but also alternative solutions.
Intelectuals like Sam ALWAYS want to bypass public discussions by claiming the moral high ground based on technical expertise. They conflate real expertise with shady snake oil expertise and then use fearmongering to shut down public debate, just to gain poltical power.
Yes … his analogy does not apply
I think you summed up the main problems with Sam‘s argument … it is laughable
Discuss alternatives with how many people? A thousand, a million? That at some point you have to depend on trained minds. Chomsky is entitled to his political opinions, I don’t want him in charge of vaccine development, just as I don’t want Bret Weinstein in charge. Sam makes sense.
@@ELL289 science and policy arent the same fckng thing, you dummy.
@@ELL289 Bret > Sam on covid topic all the way
“Doing your own research” = watching videos that confirm your bias
Only if you’re a mouth breather🫠
@@BackcountryTreks amazing evidence refutation
Came here to find experts in the comments. Did not disappoint.
I think Sam would do great selling high end furniture
Or timeshares...
He could make me buy anything honestly
So would Bret or Robert Malone for that matter.
@@ELL289 Bot identified...
@@travisjohn4630 Sorry, not a bot! 🙋♀️
This wasn't a matter of experts but simple logic. Since the beginning, we were told covid was extremely contagious, and that you could have no symptoms and pass it on, or you could have very serious symptoms. Therefore, if people could have no symptoms, or just have light cold symptoms, the data they collected with hystrionic testing was absolutely flawed. When we look at the data from sewage none of the social distancing or mask did anything. The vaccines didn't help either. But all those things brought harm, maybe the vaccines brought the least harm, the social harms will last for a decade.
Lex throws in some of the best and the most (to the point)counter points I have seen any interviewer ask. I learn a lot from his listening style and his questions.
you consider yourself a libertarian don't you
Only 4 papers and some opinion books, scientist was a past profession. His expertise is his high self regard due to his ‘superiority’
He never claimed to be an expert for Covid for example. His thoughts on the topic are still coherent and follow the overwhelming majority of the scientists.
@I. C. Wiener overwhelming numbers of church members thought the sun revolved around the earth in 16th century. Why? Does sam speak truth to power or power to truth?
@@trystdodge6177 first of all the church aren't scientist. But even ignoring that fact, it goes to show that you don't understand science and how science works. Scientist can be wrong. Even the majority of scientists can be wrong. Science evolves it's part of the game.
This does not mean people like Brett Weinstein are right. It takes a bit more than a badly written paper or study to change the current dominant opinion.
He says so himself. He's more of a philosopher, not a practicing neuroscientist. Something else he is though, is quite good at explaining his perspective with logic and reason
@@st3ppenwolf Gish gallop rarely contains well reasoned explanations.
And to further prove Sam's point on experts in Oncology - even oncologists will, at times, seek out the 2nd opinion of those with more expertise than themselves. There is a chain of expertise in most fields. All electricians have done their Journey Men placements to learn from other more experienced Electirians until they have worked long enough to provide safe reliable practises.
It's one thing to be able to read, it's another to process it
After processing the information can you fact check that info.
After fact checking it are you able to ignore your bias on the information you have processed and fact checked
Now 5 , 10 , 20 years later does the information now available continue the same path or do you adjust.
This last one is sometimes the most difficult and problematic step to deal with.
5 minutes in and wtf are you trying to say?
"You should be informed on a subject, but the inventor of mRNA vaccines should be censored when criticizing the mRNA vaccines."
-Malibu Meditator
In the end his best argument is one of authority. Regardless, he's quick to dismiss experts with credentials just because they smell fishy. For Sam, anything that doesn't fit in the dominant narrative is fishy or conspiratory
Thomas Midgley Jr was an expert on leaded petrol. He was also lying his ass off about the detrimental effects of it.
COVID is a multi factorial problem too
Wow Donald Trump really did break Sam Harris’s brain. He can’t go 3 minutes without talking about Trump. Even when he’s not talking about him, he’s thinking about the Donald you can see it in his eyes
Trump Derangement Syndrome is chronic & symptoms appear for years after initial onset
Trump broke all our brains, including his own.
Funny how Sam says "always confer to the experts" but, by all means, ignore Peter McCullough on any heart issues....smh
The blind trust many have in the establishment figures is only outdone by the blind trust just as many have in a doctor who appears on Joe Rogans podcast.
@@rbrinks5 outdone you say? You, apparently, have no clue who he is....smh
When analysing contributions of experts you have to control for:
Biases
Blind spots
Middle men noise
Politics
Uncertainties presented as certainties
With airplane pilots all those who were affected by any of these above are dead, the consequences are disastrous and people at fault cannot hide behind the complexity. With more complex issues like health, the signal to noise analysis of their contribution is more complex. If you can’t control for the above contaminants, how can you say for sure that the contribution you get is not the opposite of the truth. That is our challenge as a society, since we do need experts.
The most reasonable take I have heard in this issue
Sam should listen to the experts and get as many booster shots as they say is necessary... or is he the only one allowed to question experts?
Maybe he did.
@@jumpinjohnnyruss listen to the whole podcast. He said he's not going to because he doesn't think it's necessary. He's making decisions for himself instead of following leadership the way he said everyone should.
Sam is the smartest man alive. We should all listen to him or else we're fascist and we should go to jail
@@vladsaveluc2659 Is that what you've heard him saying? No? Interesting.
@@jumpinjohnnyruss that's what he said, listen carefully to the entire podcast
I think a lot of the initial advice from experts on the virus was straightforward and rational. Remember 6 feet, 15 minutes, and enclosed spaces? Also, the 1% fatality rate and high risk demographics. Work from home if you can. It’s seems that so many nefarious authorities took the opportunity to exploit our fears. Why was it so politically correct to listen to the experts and then take everything 3 steps further? Then when experts say it’s ok now, it’s still not ok. We can listen and then it’s simply personal choice after that.
Novel … know it’s safe 🤔.
These experts and their Allie’s during COVID were wrong; they knew they were wrong; and they deliberately silenced and censored debate or criticism. If that doesn’t cause Sam to reevaluate, then I don’t know what else will.
A serious beat down would force reevaluation
What were they wrong about? Please elaborate
@@shanehackett4683
Everything. For example: at first, masks were only for doctors, then everybody had to wear them. Then they didnt work at all. Then they did again. Then it was better if we wore two masks. Then they didnt work again, and we are still at that point...for now. They are talking about another "variant" now that the 2024 election season is nearing, so the masks will come back, along with the lockdowns they admitted were an absolute failure and did more damage than good, especially to children. And this is on top of many doctors having to admit that they knowingly misdiagnosed a ton of covid cases to get more emergency grant money from the government.
The whole thing was blown out of proportion to the point that if nobody said anything about covid, nobody would have noticed anything was wrong as everybody would just see it as, MAYBE, a slightly bad flu season. This whole fiasco should be seen for what it is: A crime against Humanity. Especially now that a plethora of people were basically forced to take an experimental chemical that caused a massive uptick in "sudden adult death syndrome" cases. Must be a huuuuuge coincidence that something that was extremely rare suddenly became somewhat common, especially in otherwise perfectly healthy individuals, or even athletes. Lots of people dying at a young age for weird reasons that dont fit their age bracket. But all were vaccinated...hmm.
One of the fundamental problems with the world is that even people that understand fallacies like the Dunning-Kruger Effect never think the bias applies to themselves.
I think ppl have been naturally selected for a certain amount of irrational behavior as an adaptive mechanism. I wonder if any cognitive biases are possible to circumvent. It seems that by definition, it's unlikely at best and impossible at worst. Perception - filters / cognition - observation - more biased cognition - reaction.
Wait, you think the D-K effect is a fallacy ?
@@flashbazbo694 Cognitive bias, fallacy. You get the point.
I think Lex is killing it as a legit up and coming interviewer...he reminds me a lot of Jon Stewart. He's not combative, interjects humor, and has obviously taken the time to research and learn about his guests so that he can ask good questions and challenge the guest politely when needed. It's nice to see an interviewer who isn't spineless. Someone who can be respectful...but say "hey, I'm going to need you to quantify that last statement...because I think that was nonsense."
Harris has fallen into the trap that a lot of very intelligent people find themselves in. He's so smart and good at rationalizing that I honestly believe he doesn't get how bad some of his lines of logic sound. He's become amazing at convincing himself that he's right simply because he's smart.
Most universities obviously don't care about the quality of the minds that they're giving degrees to...and they do an equally terrible job at policing their own staff.
We have a country filled to the brim with "D" students that have Bachelor's degrees in hard science fields...who now believe that they're equipped to talk over other people and be listened to as "experts". The reality is that all most colleges are concerned with now is vacuuming up money as fast as banks can issue student loans to teenagers who have no business being in college in the first place.
I mean, by Sam's own line of logic...his opinion on anything Covid related should be mute silence.
“Place no head above your own.”
The Buddha
what does this mean? you are the master of your own destiny and you are accountable for what you do and what you choose to believe. The "experts" can say whatever they want but the last word is on you. No one can supersede what your inner subjective experiential reality is.
what people don't like about experts is the sense of superiority that is attached to the word, a lot of the so-called experts come from the energy of pride they see themselves as superior to the non-experts and this is why people despise them, when they come from humility it becomes a completely different story. So is not the experts that people don't like is the sense of superiority that some of them have.
People are quick to dismiss experts precisely because they have no idea how much effort is needed to develop expertise in any topic. If they were aware of this, the comment section of many UA-cam videos would be empty.
I think it's mostly because we know that some scientists will do anything to get funds for their research, the nazi scientists for example.
If you know anything about the scientific world it has a terrible problem of ego's and stubbornness. Its because of how much effort they put in their field they think they can never be wrong. Any dissenting opinion is laughed at until years later when it turns out to be true they give up defending their ideas and act like nothing happened. This is especially true in the medical field.
@@bumpin0 Doctors will persuade people to go through surgery to get money out of them... same with lawyers, contractors, technicians. People will do what benefits them. Scientists are still humans with the same flaws. What you say about egos is so on point.
@@bumpin0 I know the world of academia quite well. Academia and its vices do not define science. Whether an idea is immediately accepted or dismissed within the academic community is pretty much irrelevant, but some individuals love to complaint as if they are entitled to have their contributions accepted as self-evident. However, science does not work that way; it should be difficult to persuade others that you are correct and upend decades of conventional wisdom. That's a feature, not a bug.
@@rsmith31416 That's the problem with anything new that happens. Covid was the biggest example of of the flaws of the medical/scientific and governmental structures. After all the confusion about the virus it took only about 6 months to know what we know now. Masks didn't really work unless properly used N95, vaccines didn't stop the spread of the virus, the virus most likely leaked from a lab which is important if you don't want another pandemic, lockdowns were completely useless unless you actually locked people in their houses like china did, you could treat covid with certain drugs like monoclonal antibodies and steroids. Even though all that information was known its took those communities over 2 years to admit they fucked up and change policies. And because of how badly those communities messed up if we ever have an actually serious pandemic it will probably kill millions of more people with the lack of trust and obedience.
Oddly enough, the clip channel actually have more people debating and actually paying attention to the podcast, while the main channel is mostly people acting like bots.
I noticed that too. the main podcast was people saying how wonderful the two are together...very fishy
@@ayurvology3334 Glad I'm not the only one that noticed that. Lex does a great job pushing back on Sam's talking points then just letting him put his own foot in his mouth. The amount of times he contradicted himself was astounding. Sometimes even in the same sentence. He's so smart he can convince himself he's right about anything. It's actually kind of impressive.
Sam did make a great deal of sense. I just don’t understand the logic you’re using.
@@ELL289 Did you watch the whole interview? Not just the clip.
The full episode had a lot of people praising the fact that the conversation happened and praising both of them.
The clips had people arguing each individual points.
That's how it usually works in my experience.
I rarely comment on a full episode unless I put a time stamp to make clear what part of the conversation I'm talking about.
Clips are more suited for debate and exchange of ideas between viewers in my opinion.
Using the plane in a storm analogy, if I was on the plane it was because I chose to take that flight and accepted that if we encountered a storm that I would want the pilot to handle it.
With Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates here in Melbourne Australia, I was forced onto the 'plane' and made to let a 'pilot' control how I responded to Covid whether I believed in their expertise or not. There were other 'pilots' in other countries e.g. Sweden who had different strategies, but most of these people were maligned and anyone who supported them was marginalised in their community.
Yes, so the best course of action is to shoot down the pilot? Sounds reasonable. Or maybe not. Maybe the best thing to do is to support the pilot, so at least you land safely. Only THEN can you request that the pilot be fired.
@@fixups6536 No one forces me to get on a plane when I choose to fly. I make my own risk/reward analysis. The government on the other hand put a gun to my head and forced me on the plane. That's what Sam Harris just doesn't get. I don't care how much of an 'expert' someone is, that's not a tool to use to rule me. Share your expertise with me and I will make my own decision.
@@dennismenace4188 You live in a country. You have a government. We all have. We are all on some plane already. Next time it happens, do we support the pilot, or do we try to open all exit doors and take down the plane in the process? I sure wish we work to be better prepared for the next time it happens, because it will happen again. Your opinion certainly matters, as it is clear that it has been a painful experience for you, and it has been for me too. I do hear you, and we have to think about it and be better prepared.
@@fixups6536 the only thing we have to be prepared for in this lifetime if it happens again is complete and utter violence towards the morons that think they have any say over our bodily autonomy.
@@fixups6536 You are so naive, your understanding of the world is that of an ignorant child. You're dangerous to yourself and society at large because you make poor decisions as a result of fear. Humans who act out of fear always, always cause destruction and disintegrate the social fabric of society.
Lex did a good job of pushing back and bringing a different point of view to Sam’s perspective
The crazy thing is I KNOW Joe Rogan saw this...and still spews the things he spews
Yup
But my expert is his quack, therefore it's a losing battle w folks like Sam
If you can provide proof from high-quality sources like peer-reviewed papers and articles from academic institutions then that's one thing. If your expert's sources are some version of "trust me, it's obvious what they're doing" or "I read this thing last week" then it's not on the same level of credibility. Ultimately there are no such thing as infallible heroes - EVERYONE gets it wrong sometimes - but a) objectively verifiable facts do exist outside of opinion and they decide truth and b) education and experience reduce the chance you're way off.
@@ColinGrym I completely agree. However , folks like Sam Harris will label someone a quack if he doesn't agree with the other person's point of view. There were many "experts" with a completely different point of view. Try the Great Barrington Declaration. Additionally, why (although I may know) isn't there a committee composed of many experts in matters of such magnitude.
Sams example of a pilot is very off the mark in comparison to bankers, economists, politicians, virologists etc who have most lately benefitted from the extreme fuck ups that tgey have visited upon society in recent years.
A pilot has the same vested interest as the passengers - to land safely,
All those other experts do not, and often benefit despite what happens to Joe Public
And what pilots don’t get paid to land safely
@@karkanrey1463 test pilots 😉
This argument makes no sense because there's no reason to think a layman is more trustworthy than an expert in addition to them being less informed than an expert. So for any given level of distrust, expertise is more valuable more than ignorance on a subject assuming there is equal evidence for lack of integrity for individual experts and individual laymen.
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker." ~ Mikhail Bakunin
And if it turns out he makes shitty boots, one should no longer defer to his authority.
Sam Harris is an expert on the philosophical belief that religious books are not literally true.
Personally I find that pretty basic and self evident and think debating clergymen on such matters is a waste of time
Scientists are the new high priests.
Any expert on clinical depression would instruct people to look into their family histories for clinical depression, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, etc.
Genetics plays a significant role when a have teen or twentysomething who has everything going for them, on paper, but they're still feeling down and unusually anxious most of the time, in spite of all the good traits they exhibit, their high potential or the good circumstances they may have.
Interesting intelligent discussion, but a main topic is missing! I discover this on a personal level. As a real estate broker, on occasion I would have to stop my rig and walk around to settle down. I called a doctor friend and he said my hypertension is fairly common and smart to take a break. I search the internet several days and discovered Dr Gundry. He retired as a world heart surgeon to start a program restricting what you eat and drink on his UA-cam segments. On his diet for 10 years and feel excellent at 81. Hypertension disappeared immediately.
Experts exist... you should listen to them... but they often have no idea what they're talking about and you shouldn't listen to anyone who has ideas outside of them because they don't have the credentials... got it.
problem is when these experts are paid to lie
If that's what you took from Sam on this you have much bigger problems than whether you should listen to experts. You need to work on basic understanding of rational concepts from the base level.
So as I read it your conclusion is that education and experience don't render someone infallible, especially in complex situation like a novel virus causing meaningful harm. As a result of that uncertainty even amongst experts, knowledge no longer matters and every opinion is equally as valid. Maybe we should apply that approach to other fields of science - perhaps we'd have fusion power by now if we asked the general public to throw in their takes on how nuclear reactors should be constructed. Dude, not all opinions are suddenly rendered equally worthwhile simply because the problem is difficult.
@@ColinGrym That is absolutely correct. The more difficult, unpredictable and new the problem, the more we should leave it to the people who understand and have been practicing the field for a long time. The idea that anyone in the know is lying because someone is paying them to do so is the real virus that will cause our destruction. If one really wants to believe in conspiracy theories, it is best to think about who might actually be conspiring against us. Could it be that a hostile foreign country wants us to believe that experts in our own country are lying to us? Who are we serving by casting doubt on the reputation of people who have spent their lives working in a field vital to our survival?
@@ColinGrym I don’t think anyone is saying don’t listen to experts. I think people are saying take in a healthy amount of skepticism. It really wasn’t the experts that were getting things wrong. It was the media spinning a narrative that wasn’t true. They likely distorted expert info. So on one hand, the experts were giving out pretty great information, as quickly as they could. The decisions made with that info I think is what people became upset with.
From what I have seen is that neither side truly understands each others position. So they try to rationalize the other sides position (usual in an unflattering way) so they can be correct against them.
The issue is that the opinions of experts is colored by too many other factors, from narcissism, self absorption, to true conflicts of interest where they realize money or prestige is being left on the table if they choose option A, so instead they go for option B just like anyone else because they are not on the same airplane as us and don't give two shits whether we are able to land the plane in a storm, to use his example. They booked a very different flight from the get go, and those tickets are rarely available to the rest of us.
They are on private airplanes.
Just trust UA-camrs.
Except what we're dealing with is more analogous of one pilot attending an expensive flight school while the other paid for lessons. Both trained with the same information and equipment but one has networking and developed their career through the establishment.
No. What we’re dealing with is one guy who MAYBE took a lesson once, or who maybe was REALLY GREAT at flight simulator games thinking he knows better than an actual pilot with thousands of hours of logged flight time and training with real airplanes. THAT is what is going on nowadays
Thank you Lex for your work, and for the 20 seconds of silence you add at the end of your clips, which allow me to pause the video while I'm still absorbing the wise words just spoken, before some desperate ugly obnoxious guy blows my ears off with a crypto-BS UA-cam commercial.
Hate this guy. He’s every bit of the problem with society. In short, everything he says is he wants you (all of us) to be submissive and for him and people like him to be in control.
You're a submissive hater. Got it.
Pretty interesting conversation. I have to side with Sam on this one. Lex suggests everyone can do their own research, but to do that they would need to be perfectly rational, have some degree of scientific literacy and media literacy. This is not the case! Sure lex is all of these, but the average person is not. They will let their confirmation bias lead them and sometimes to really bad conclusions. One top of the fact that our politics are to some degree broken and the truth has become tribal. We could have probably saved 300K lives just in the US. Doing your own research in this case was catastrophic. On top of that, there are a ton of charlatans out there that the layman can’t disprove because they don’t know what questions to ask.
Most people trusted the experts early on in the pandemic. Now even Sam says he is hesitant to take more shots, despite the recommendation to take them from the experts at the government say we should do, to us and our kids.
This is all there is to say about that.
Sams assuming the experts aren’t lying
As of recent history
So said experts lie like a rug
How do you know they lied? Did some other "experts" tell you that? This is why we're in a post-truth society; people just claim shit and people believe or disbelieve based on political alignment instead of having the humility to realize when they shouldn't have an opinion at all.
He admits that some experts lie, the point is the net positive of expertise, and a world without experts would be catastrophically worse
He admits that some experts lie, and he puts this in perspective: this is not the case in general, and if we take the fact that an expert has lied (or simply screwed up) as the general case for advocating that we should not listen to experts, then we are going in the wrong direction and will regress. It is good to keep in mind that one expert can be wrong, but it is probably not wise to extrapolate from this that all experts are worthless. It's a matter common sense.
@@EpsilonAJS You're asleep if you haven't noticed the lies.
Where would you like to start? Collins/Fauci email scandal. PV videos - cherry health, Pfizer exec admitting altering the virus. Walensky unable to answer a single question in Congress.
The unscientific mandates. The lie of 15 days to flatten the curve turning into 3 jabs to keep your job, and start scanning qr codes to get into everywhere.
Censorship en masse. UA-cam removed the dislike button because everyone was downvoting all of the propaganda.
I haven't even started, I can go on for hours about the lies. Haven't even begun talking about China.
What reality have you been living in? Do you believe in all state media? Do you believe in Russian/ Chinese media? What do you/ don't you believe in, and why?
Lex has surprised me in his interview with Sam. I don't understand how Lex doesn't see the logic and sound advice of Sam. I always thought he would listen to Joe Rogan's conspiracy theories simply because they are friends but didn't actually buy into them. I am now under the impression I was wrong, Lex actually believes them. I've lost some respect for Lex. I really thought he was smart enough to avoid rabbit holes.
I agree, doesn’t matter what Sam could say, it’s always “but what if “. It’s like Neil Tyson on Rogan, rogan mentions that we don’t know a lot about gravity, Tyson shuts him down immediately and says something like , “I’m okay with the information we have about gravity, sometimes you have to move on and not dwell on it”
I sympathize with the honest, competent and good faith experts, because unlike themthere are a LOT that aren't operating in a similar good faith manner and are singlehandedly destroying the trust that people used to have in them. The problem is that presently it seems like it's the bad faith experts that have the microphone, so to speak. What's worse is that a lot of the honest and knowledgeable ones are getting actively silenced by the others, and those others seem to be working hand in hand with the other shitheads from other fields and disciplines: medicine, journalism, academia, etc.I'm a history geek, especially ancient history and more specifically Roman history from around the third-forth century BCE-beginning of the third CE, but I am NOT an expert. I went to college with the goal of working in Classical studies, but for reasons irrelevant to this comment, I didn't finish.
I was listening to a ancient history podcast a week or two ago that was doing an episode on the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. Severus is one of those emperor's that falls in the era where my knowledge starts to wane, but I'm still familiar enough with him; his rule and his sons. They had an expert on who had been on the show before in what had been there most popular episode, so I was looking forward to it.
Within the first few minutes of talking about the subject, this expert says "Severus was black, he was from North Africa. Let me repeat that: he was a black Roman emperor." That was the moment I realized "shit, they're right: they really ARE ruining academia."
Severus was most certainly not a black man. I'm not going to make the "there's a difference between Africa and sub-Saharan Africa," argument that's usually used in these debates, though it is a mostly solid one: Egypt, Afghanistan and Lybia are in North Africa, and I don't know anyone who would consider them black. There were some people in N Africa at the time, like some Berbers that could be considered black, but it's irrelevant. Severus could have been born in the heart of the Congo and he still wouldn't be black: his father was Carthaginian, and Carthaginians were descended from Phoenicians.Phoenicians were a semetic ethnicity group, like ancient Israelites and Arabs. Severus' mother was Italic, and as Roman as one could possibly be. I don't mean Roman as in "you're born in Gaul in 100CE, therefore your a Roman." I mean her family were Patricians (a group that were few and far in between by this point in history. Her being patrician means that, with the exception of the Claudii, her family traces itself all the way back to the days before the Republic, when Rome was ruled by a king. A era that Julius Caesar would have considered ancient, around the seventh or eighth century BCE.
In the spirit of transparency I'll freely almost that along with the label of historian, I am also not a geneticist or anthropologist. That said, last I checked "Arab+Western European" does not equal black. Beyond that there are plenty of other things that can be cited to counter his assertion.
My problem isn't whether Severus is black or white; it's incidental, my problem is this "expert."
You don't need to be an expert to know the information I just laid out; a quick Google search can bring you to the relevant information, and yet this gentleman seemed to be wholly ignorant of it. This…guest on the podcast is supposed to be an expert while I am nothing of the kind. Maybe this is just my puny brain and it's limited functionality missing something that a more intelligent person might see 🥴(that's my simpleton face, you like?), but as far as I can tell this comes down to one of two scenarios; either A) this guy was unaware of these particular facts, or B) he was well aware of them but was being duplicitous and ignoring them in order to tell a different story, one the he felt was a better one to tell us.
Since I find it extremely difficult to believe that he didn't know these things, I'd have to do with scenario B. The implications are as infuriating to me as they are legion (pun intended). This is a historian, an educator. His job is to teach people things about the world that they aren't yet aware of, and this is a huge responsibility. Just the contempt alone that he must hold for the rest of us is a thing to behold. Apparently he doesn't think the rest of us are worthy or capable of possessing the knowledge that he holds. Instead, similar to how a parent may tell a young child that their dog that died went to live on a farm so as to not rattle our innocent and fragile selves, he makes up a story he feels is more palatable.
THIS, Sam Harris; this is why people hold experts in such low regard.
*I wrote this in the comment block in the UA-cam app on my phone. I haven't even gone back to proofread it, but I know it's going to be insufferably long. My apologies.😅
Edit: Jesus Christ Sam. "In good times 'doing your own research,' is a waste of time." Seriously? You really believe that? Well, the implications of that statement are as bad as the ones of the historian. I ENJOY doing my own research, I love learning new things and especially love it when I learn that something I thought to be true wasn't, and I come away with more knowledge. I honestly don't know if he's just saying this as a poorly thought out argument, because in spite of his "I'm not saying" caveat, he in fact is telling people to blindly listen to experts. I can't watch anymore interviews with him, I just lose more and more respect for him in his field of study, but even more as a person. He is doing himself no favors coming onto these shows. Someone needs to stage an intervention to get him to shut up, at least for a few months.
Yeah, its insane how so many are lapping up what Sam is saying without actually listening to WHAT he is saying. Dudes an authoritarian nutball that disguises his bad intentions with a calm demeanor. People arnt listening to what he is saying, just how he is saying it. Its like being hypnotized into doing something terrible...with a smile on your face. And most of these people dont realize it.
There's a significant amount of experts whose voices are completely silenced. There should be a dialogue between experts not a unilateral push to amplify experts who aren't even willing to be questioned by others
Why. That would only complicate things. There is only one science, nothing to be questioned. One who owns the data owns the gold. Science is science. Data is data. Data is the new gold.
Preferably it is not to have data and just to say that you have data.
And truly there is no data. Situation was so COMPLEX that in reality you could not have data. It was presumptuous to tell that by looking at the 'data' you knew what to do like you could read the future and what your action will do. What happened to all those 2020 ventilators. Only one data you could trust, that is a stock market. You just needed to concentrate on pushing a defective product and laugh all the way to the bank.
No one does their own research, and that's not what this conversation is about. Doing your own research would be setting up and executing your own study. If you're not doing that, then you're deferring to someone else. This entire conversation, then, isn't about whether or not you should trust experts, but how you choose which experts to trust. That's a matter of their motives, claims, and evidence. This conversation seems to miss the point entirely.
Lex even says that maybe you can trust "real" experts, but not the "communicators" right after saying it's easy to do your own research and read meta analyses and "blog posts" about those metaanalyses. My man, those two things are the same.
What about humility? There is good and bad information out there. And there are also outright lies. When someone spends hours on the internet doing what they call research, often they do not know the validity of the sources they are using, only that it agrees or disagrees with their own opinion and it's natural to follow what makes sense. This can be a massive mistake.
There in fact is a clear defintion of expertise: "a high level of domain-specific knowledge and skills accumulated with age or experience". experts are practiced people who have on-the-order-of 1000 hours of experience applying what they know to both regular and rare problems. Dr Harris is conflating certified professionals, media-proclaimed personalities and other individuals who went confirmation-bias-shopping on google all as experts. They're not.
He specifically made the distinction between experts and communicators. Experts are those with 1000+ hours of work on a topic whereas communicators are politicians and news people, some of who have a non-scientific agenda.
If my car breaks down, I definitely find the first person who has recently watched a few UA-cam videos on auto repair to help me.
"is there such a thing as expertise"
-lex fridman, an intellectual genius
there is when combatting bullshit. sam Harris-realistic genius
Honestly, was expecting much more from Harris.
What was your problem with What he said?
@@therantingboy his point was experts are experts are experts. Non-experts can’t have an opinion. Sam has more in him and it was clear he was only trying to talk down criticisms of experts, because they are experts while barely allowing the acknowledgment that the allowed consensus on Covid was wrong a fair amount. He also shunned non-expert research.
I was expecting complete sentences or at least complete thoughts from UA-cam commenters.
@@jumpinjohnnyruss Why do you expect that on UA-cam?
Sam Harris is the perfect example of his own metaphor that he made fun of...... he muses about the airplane at thirty thousand feet and some random guy walks into the cockpit and says he has some new ideas about how to fly the plane. Sam Harris "PRECISELY" did that exact thing a few decades ago when he wasn't even a successful neuroscientist at all and then decided he'd burst into the cockpit of professional Philosophy circles and started telling lies and pretending he could talk about the philosophy of free will while screwing it up and making logical fallacies and being a bull in a china-closet. He makes no sense, he made no impact, he never provided any helpful clarification on anything and never resolved any problem....he just made more problems, and made a fool out of himself. And professional philosophers now admit that he did such, and have sent him back to strap himself into his chair and shut up from now on.
What was he wrong about philosophically?
@@jumpinjohnnyruss The more appropriate question would be what wasn't he wrong about.
@@laertesindeed "Would be" (i.e. under unnamed counterfactual conditions) being the operative phrase, right?
Fun fact neuroscience is not actually a scientific discipline. It's a sub discipline of psychology and 99% of professors who teach neuroscience grad students are psychology PhDs and neuroscience has a notorious abysmal record of data replication via experiments...yes I know some psychology departments use scientific tools to get better replication of data but it's not science.
Also, Sam is not and has never been a scientist and did some study of methods during grad school...but no neuroscience departments are not expert's in scientific methodology...when I was in grad school I also took 3 courses in methods etc and was part of journal clubs but I certainly laughed at the the neuroscience students most are like Sam... nothing resembling scientist's
Neither one of the Wright brothers should have been flying a plane.
Disappointingly medieval. If I need a medical diagnosis, of course I go to a doctor (duh). But when he opines that I have disease X and I ask, "What makes you think so?", the answer I don't want is "I went to Harvard and am certified by agency XYZ." The discussion is about the rules of evidence, not about the fact that some people are right more often than others in their alleged fields of specialization. We have to distinguish between when we are trusting the expert and when they provide transparent reasons for their proclamations. It is fallacy to think that "the public" cannot understand the reasoning behind expert decisions. On any given issue, some members of the public can understand that -- some better than the government appointees -- and some cannot. The secondary responsibility of gov't appointed experts is to make recommendations and rulings; their primary responsibility is to use the resources and expertise at their disposal to gather and present evidence to facilitate the public discourse among other experts. But that is not what witchdoctor Fauci did, is it?
They say this guy is brilliant.. I dont see it. This guy.
Second and third opinions were not allowed during the pandemic. That’s the problem. Legitimate experts were shadow banned or threatened with loss of jobs. California passed a law saying experts couldn’t give their expert opinions if they contradicted the consensus…
There's an unfortunate subtext to the idea Sam Harris brings up regarding relying on experts. It's not just a matter of trusting experts, it's a matter of trusting the curators who are bringing those experts to the public's attention, and also trusting the experts not to tailor the truth with lies designed for safe public consumption. There's a very strong ethos floating around, and one that Sam Harris himself holds, that people can't be trusted to hear dangerous ideas. So why should we trust an expert who holds this view that is not compatible with a forthright communication of all the facts?
People didn't suddenly go crazy and start seeking out more and more fringe philosophies, they simply continue to be let down by proponents of this belief that truth should be evaluated based on the amount of damage you can presume it might cause, and this applies more than ever in politically contentious discourse.
All well and good but sacking people because they don't want to get a vaccine which carries a risk is totally unforgivable in my opinion.
Just needed to find the limit for the next time so we can push a bit harder. Sorry.
CIA; The Paradox of Expertise: the strengths of expertise can also be weaknesses. Although one would expect experts to be good forecasters, they are not particularly good at making predictions about the future.
Sam only eats Blue pills
When becoming an 'expert' in anything means submitting to a malevolent political ideology, you can't expect people to take them seriously. The classification of 'expertise' is corrupted, and people are responding appropriately.
Political ideology exists everywhere, you yourself might have gotten to where you are at because someone manipulated your political and social grievances
I agree with what Sam said at the end here.
I agree with the Sam Harris talk ending.
Doing your own research -- EXCELLENT reply Lex.
You absolutely should do your own research, as long as you can distinguish fact from fiction. What's the point of doing research if it's just to pick and choose your "truths" to confirm your own bias? That was the problem with the MAGA cult; they would do their "research" on right-wing sites only, that was just full of verifiably false information or conspiracies based on zero evidence or science. This is when one should defer to experts, to confirm their own research, not simply to re-enforce their already held beliefs with bs.
Knowledge from the Internet?
There is importance in systematic knowledge, when you go to study in school of higher education you will not take a course on Genetics if you did not take a course on Microbiology, you will not take a course on Biochemistry if you did not take a course on Organic Chemistry, you will not take a course on Differential Geometry if you did not take courses in Calculus. And even in those very courses you will have to follow organized system from the beginning. So, no you will NOT become a science expert surfing internet on your own no matter how much you wish to avoid the hard systematic work. Lazy people do not know anything other than their own opinions.
Damn Sam, you parse things in a way only you could! Fantastic. My brain smiles when you talk.
Thanks Lex learned a lot here. Sam explains his thoughts on things so throughly and reasonably it’s hard to intellectually or intelligently disagree with him but you’ve shown me a different angle. Well done sir.
Yes ,BUT he seems to actually have a little trouble in spotting bullshit, though.
@@user-hf4eh2ts3q those truckers couldn’t spot bs when your mother was saying birth control. Now we have you. Sad.
Trust the experts. Trust me on this, I am an expert.
I might be wrong, sometimes, but in those cases, if things were different I’d be right. So, you see, I am always right.
And surely I don’t need to debate Brett Weinstein: I can simply go everywhere and talk s@&t about him. Every time I do I feel so righteous, no need to face him.
Expertise is not a consensus. Galileo was an expert. Consensus is vulnerable to status motivations. The anti covid vax anti lockdown crowd listened to Galileo.
There's nothing when experts or scientists are wrong, it is a problem when they claim certainty when they are not, and then refuse to admit they were wrong and explain why.
Experts & Scientist`s need to eat . See where their money comes from &you`ll see where their opinion goes. Covid has fleshed that out for us now hasn`t it
Differing to experts involuntarily was the problem, Sam.
How "expert" of you to have an clear idea of a counterfactual's outcome
@@st3ppenwolf is demonstrating the usefulness of unsolicited "expertise". The agreed upon consultation fee is in the mail.
@@randybearded your “expert” opinion is not exempt from criticism
@@st3ppenwolf Yes, a choice. Consensual .
@@randybearded funny how you don't argue with being labeled "expert".. hypocricy at its finest
Something I have noticed is that when it comes to serious, time-sensitive topics, telling the general public to "do your own research" actually dilutes whatever truth is already there because then you flood the information market with incorrect information. It's becoming a problem more and more because humanity's problems that need to be solved, in order to endure as a species, requires super specialized knowledge that takes a decade at minimum in order to comprehend it enough to know how to deal with an emergency related to their area of expertise.
The problem is you'll always have one group saying "X said it's so and so" and the other group saying "Y said it's actually so and so". Both groups have their experts, both think they're right.
What I don't understand is why when 99.9% of the scientists is on the page, you'd trust the 0.1% that says stuff like "take horse dewormer if you get viral infect" lol
Ok but the problem with trusting the government with serious time-sensitive topics is the government doesn't have our best interests in mind and almost always (always?) makes the absolute worst decision imaginable no matter what the problem is, usually after the government themselves have created the problem by implementing the worst possible solution to a previous problem that was also created by the government.
Like Sadiq's ULEZ bullshit. It's designed to clean up the environment, tackle climate change and so kids with asthma can breathe better in busy cities with lots of traffic. Except it doesn't do any of those things. It doesn't reduce the amount of cars in cities, it just makes the people who have to drive in cities pay an extra fee for the privilege.
3 words: Social Behavioural Scientists
Difference is in aviation: when the expert is wrong, he’s dead.
reading blog posts is not "doing research". reading "meta-analysis" is not "doing research". watching youtube videos is not "doing research". the fact that lex seems to think it is makes a lot of sense.
Sam "Points should be made by using non-sequitur analogies" Harris
Sam Harris, expert about experts.
People keep saying (stay in your lane) you people do realize that this is not how language works correct? The tools needed to decode data are English and mathematics and if you possess both and understand what a logical fallacy is then you yourself can decode any data in front of your face...you people are all trying to tell people they don't understand the language and I'm pretty sure it's just because YOU DONT UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE YOU ARE UNEDUCATED...just because you are too lazy or incapable to be a polymath does not mean they do not exist or are not the goal where intelligence is concerned. "I'm not saying blindly follow authority just follow the 97%" yeah that's nonsense didn't need any fancy specialization to figure that out.
I disagree fully. The problem is what's viewed widely at large and identified by experts doesn't play out on an individual level sometimes.
Hasn't the saga of String Theory been a case study on how expertise can both fail, and how mistakes or failed hopes or projections can turn even some of the brightest people in the world into at best blind fools, or at worst unrepentant liars? Sam's earlier point is important. Yes experts can be wrong and layman can be right. Sure we all agree. But experts get it right most of the time, at least compared to layman. Still, absolutely true. But what happens to experts when the incentive structure changes? Truth is indeed orthogonal to the reputational pedigree of any one person, but trustworthiness is on a separate axis as well. If we are talking about mistakes, or the rate of factual error, betting on expertise is the most consistent and safe method. But does expertise add any trustworthiness? When we leave the realm of mistakes, and enter the realm of deception, is expertise still a worthwhile parameter to bet on? My answer is yes, but to a much lesser degree. When a person is no longer honest, or no longer objective enough to be honest, the value of their expertise needs to be greatly diminished when we are assessing their opinions.
A waste of time? I don't see what people like about this guy at all.
What you see now is the fallen remains of whom was once a greater mind, somewhat similar to what happened to Chomsky.
I understand his ignorance when it comes to politics…but what don’t you like about him aside from that?
What are you an expert in Sam?
He’s a neuroscientist.
@@ELL289 He doesn't now and hasn't for a long time written almost anything about neuroscience or done anything related to it, he just has a Ph.D. in it. FWIW I agree with him more than most here, but he's more like a cultural commentator who happens to have a Ph.D. in neuroscience.
@@ELL289 In that case, perhaps he ought to take his own advice, and stay in his lane. His stoic, detached approach, is his undoing. I rarely see Harris smile or express joy, yet he proposes that how we ought to observe this earthly realm. In hoc signo vinces +.
Somewhere along the way arrogance took over and people now resent experts. On Pawn Stars the other day they asked if they could bring in an expert to look at an item and the guy said “He’s not some college puke is he?” 🤦♂️
Sam Harris, claiming to be immune to Dunning Krueger effect...misrepresents RFK Jr.'s stance on vaccines. NICE