RedDave2 wrote:

I always like rogans stuff. He gets involved w8th the interviewee but doesn't try to dominate or try to be the smartest guy in the room. His podcasts with Harris are usually interesting. However, you might want to have a look at the Abby Martin vs Sam Harris video on YouTube. It's bits from both being on rogans show and discussing how many died during the Iraq and how responsible the US was for those deaths. Harris jumps through some insane hoops to try and claim that America shouldn't be held responsible for all those deaths as they were only the military action and they couldn't have known the civil war they would create. Rogan calls him on it numerous times and there is a terrible analogy with the casualties of civilians from drone strikes to road deaths. For a smart guy, Harris comes across as an idiot to be honest and it's clear he apply bias to figures as much as anyone when he wants to. He has a clear ideology that he is on the side of good guys and those against are bad guys who want to destroy the good guys. He ignores the obvious effect of the "good guys" meddling with the "bad guys" country (again Rogan calls him on it)

Yeah I like Rogan mostly. I've only seen maybe 20 or so of the podcasts but he's a good host.

Have seen the Abby Martin stuff - a while ago mind. That's a whole other can of worms though.

edit: I think I'll revisit that. Don't remember some of those details you mention.

hunk wrote:

Do keep up Jrpc. Summary Discussion: As Klein points out Harris has a blind spot and is incapable of framing the discussion on Murray's work in a larger context of science, philosophy, history and society. Unconsciously, Harris is influenced and disturbed by fake news campaigns and like with sjw's it influences his stance and arguments causing him to side with Murray. Yet Harris is incapable of self reflection and is too stubborn to admit he has a blind spot and is therefore biased. Reasons on why people fall into this behaviour without realising it https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/4/11/16897062/political-psychology-trump-explain-studies-research-science-motivated-reasoning-bias-fake-news More indication that Murray's premise and data (methods, conclusions and results) are biased in Facewon's link https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray-odious This is also one of the reasons why the scientific community considers Murray's work to be pseudo science. The other reasons being Kuhn and Popper. Obviously.

Oh no I've seen all that stuff. 

When you said the thread had been won I thought there must have been something substantive I'd missed.

Maybe a link to it hunk? I really don't want to be wrong about this for any longer than I need to.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/24/george-yancy-dear-white-america-philosopher-confront-racism

Moving on past Klein Vs Murray and Harris.
Above article addresses the how and why of the toxic environmental factors nurturing Murray's system of belief and underlying assumptions. Needless to say outlook is bleak.

Wish I hadn't read that, put me in a depressed mode which will last most of the day I think.

Why is humanity so fucking awful to itself I'll never understand.

I might read that, as I've seen it mentioned before and some of the points made seemed a bit erm, strange. I've got no axe to grind against Pinker (who I know nothing about beyond a couple of cognitive psychology things I read of his in uni) but I think he might have missed the point. Taken from the wiki summary. 

Pinker argues that economic inequality "is not itself a dimension of human wellbeing" and cites a study that finds inequality is not linked to unhappiness, at least in poorer societies.

He also points out that the world as a whole is becoming more equal, and states that even within increasingly unequal areas, the poor are still getting wealth and benefit from technological innovations. 

For example, it is clear to Pinker that an innovation that makes the poor slightly richer and the rich massively richer is a positive rather than a negative achievement. 

It's not clear to me. If a village has a field of potatoes and some prick comes along and takes 90% of them leaving everyone else to fight for scraps, that's not a positive outcome. Yes, it's better than no potatoes but come on. Silly example maybe. 

The book concludes with three chapters defending what Pinker sees as Enlightenment values: reason, science, and humanism.

Pinker argues that these values are under threat from modern trends such as religious fundamentalism, political correctness, and postmodernism.

In an interview about the book published in Scientific American, Pinker has clarified that his book is not merely an expression of hope—it is a documentation of how much we have gained as a result of Enlightenment values, and how much we have to lose if those values are abandoned.

Erm, exactly? The prevailing political forces at the moment are anti-Enlightenment - knowledge, reason, freedom, openness, rational unbiased examination, fuck that, get them immigrants out, tear up the trade deals, women back in the kitchen. 

It's more about the direction of travel for me. Some people's lives are clearly worse than they were ten years ago. Deprived parts of Britain are having lowering life expectancy for the first time since the war, food banks, depressed wages, etc. My life is ok but it might not be soon, the middle class is getting eaten out from the bottom (um, you know what I mean). The technological progress we make is of mixed benefit e.g. I can have whatever I want delivered to my door within 24 hours now, but it's coming at the expense of wider retail, choice, working conditions. 

Bit of a rant. Maybe Pinker addresses this stuff. Like I said, I'd seen this talked about before somewhere as if it was the solution we'd all been waiting for and thought the whole conversation was wide of the mark.

I think I might be going off Pinker, which is a shame as I quite liked Better Angels.

I'm not wedded to that potato example. Maybe something like Uber is better. Previously unemployed people are better off than they were before working for Uber, they're probably better off than they would have been 30 or 40 years ago, but not as well off as they could be (or maybe should be) or, in some cases, are legally entitled to be. They may have benefited more (in relative terms) from a workplace innovation decades ago than they would today. 

Things could always be better, but you can't look at these things in terms of marginal net gains to an individual when the system at work has such wide repercussions.

Pinker can go in a bin with Harris.

Monkey from reading what you've said here I think this book would fairly profoundly challenge some of your ideas about stuff (as it did mine).

It isn't that you can't find plenty of examples of bad stuff going on of course, but there's less bad stuff than ever before and in measures that really matter - poverty, universal education, sexual equality, violence, racism, nutrition etc we've never been in a better place.

The inequality point is definitely one of the more challenging ideas in the book. First off he points out that globally we're doing much better with inequality, but more than that actually challenges the idea that inequality is some sort of great evil in itself which lots of people seem to see it as (including myself i think prior to the book). It isn't.

In fact times that correlate with most the equal societies are typically times of catastrophy - war, epidemics etc. Inequality seems to go hand in hand with growth and innovation that raises the tide for everyone.

He also points out that people at the bottom of society currently have it better in important ways than the richest did not so long ago.

I really need to read it again. Attention wained in the second half - it's incredible, but it's long and dense with dozens of graphs a tables and the like. It's a bit of a slog.

The inequality point is definitely one of the more challenging ideas in the book. First off he points out that globally we're doing much better with inequality, but more than that actually challenges the idea that inequality is some sort of great evil in itself which lots of people seem to see it as (including myself i think prior to the book). It isn't.

He's going to need some truly remarkable data to pull this off.

Here we go with the questions. All these Harris cultists do is shit on the table, then ask "can you explain what it is that find foul about the smell".

Couldn't stick around for the last argument, ran off, comes back with another. Yawn. Once a moral positivist, always a moral positivist.

Inequality is relative. Plenty of serious scholars about inequality - Steven Pinker is pretty off his kilter on this stuff, he is nowhere near qualified - are more worthy of our time.

Right.

You can but you're chosing not to?

Surely extreme inequality, as we have now - coupled with a global economy - suggests those at the top could help those at the bottom but are choosing not to. They'd rather get/stay unnecessarily rich.

That feels pretty inherently bad to me. I fail to see how them helping others would make anything worse.

It may be that today's poorest are better off than yesterday's richest, but that doesn't mean today's richest aren't cunts

Not that I believe the predicate, anyway

I'm going to go back and read that chapter again. I've bought it on Audible too so will maybe give it a listen at work if there's time.

People seem to conflate inequality with poverty, as if there's a finite pot of money and so if the rich are getting richer that means the poor must be getting poorer.

This isn't the case at all.

When the rich get richer, the poor actually get richer too.

Brooks wrote:

You've had enough.

Haha, harsh.
I wanted to post an obvious explanation but thought; fuck it.
Won't get dragged down again in an argument with jrpc where he ignores practically all my points. Not again.