YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Harris

lines on the record: 307
first: 2023-03-14
most recent: 2023-03-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think at least twice by Soviet submarine commanders deciding, I'm not going to pass this up the chain of command, right? Like this is. This is almost certainly an error, and it turns out it was an error. It's like, and we need people to, I mean, in that particular case, like he saw, I think it was five what seemed like five missiles launched from the US to Russia. And he reasoned if America was going to engage in a first strike, they'd launch more than five missiles, right? So this has to be fictional. And then he waited long enough to decide that it was fictional. The probability of a nuclear war happening by mistake or some other species of inadvertence, you know, misunderstanding. Technical malfunction. That's intolerable. Forget about the intentional use of it by people who are, you know. Driven crazy by some ideology.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they were putting the ongoing risk. I mean, just the risk that we're going to have a proper nuclear war at some point in the next generation. People were putting it at something like 50%. They were living with this sort of Damocles over our heads. Now you might wonder whether Anyone can have reliable intuitions about the probability of that kind of thing. The status quo is truly alarming. I mean, we've got ICBMs on, I mean, leaf aside smaller exchanges and tactical nukes and how that could, how we could have a world war based on incremental changes. We've got. The biggest bombs aimed at the biggest cities in both directions. And it's old technology, right? And it's vulnerable to some lunatic deciding to launch or misreading bad data. And we know we've been saved from nuclear war.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I think we have this. This general problem that we can't make Certain information, even unequivocally certain information. Emotionally salient. Like we respond quite. Talked about, we respond to the The little girl who fell down a well, I mean, that just gets 100% of our emotional resources. But the abstract probability of nuclear war, right, even a high probability, even just an intolerable probability, even if we put it at 30%. That's Russian roulette with a gun with three chambers. And it's aimed at the heads, not only your head, but your kid's head and everyone's kid's head. And it's just 24 hours a day. I mean, I think people who this pre-Ukraine, I think the people who have made it their business to Professionally to think about the risk of nuclear war and to mitigate it. People like Graham Allison or William Perry or...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The amazing thing about this AI conversation though is that we're talking about a circumstance where We would be designing the aliens. And there's every reason to believe that eventually this is going to happen. So I'm not at all skeptical about the coming reality of the aliens and we're going to build them.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he doesn't, I mean, I have since seen some of those videos. Now this is going back still at least a year, but some of those videos seem like fairly credible debunkings of some of the optical evidence And I'm surprised we haven't seen more of that. Like there was a fairly credulous 60 minutes piece that came out around that time looking at some of that video. And it was the very video that he was debunking on YouTube and his video only had like 50,000 views on it or whatever. But again, it seemed like a fairly credible debunking. I haven't seen debunkings of his debunkings.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some degree an understandable defense mechanism against the bogus claims that That have been made about this kind of thing in the past. The general sense is probably bullshit or it probably has some explanation that is purely terrestrial and not surprising. And there is somebody who... His name is Mick West. I forget. Is it a YouTuber? Yeah.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I always think many people noticed this. I mean, this was a sign of how crazy the news cycle was at that point, right? Like we had COVID and we had Trump. And I forget when the UFO thing was really kicking off It just seemed like no one had the bandwidth to even be interested in this. It's like I was amazed to Notice in myself I wasn't more interested in figuring out what was going on. It's like, and I considered, okay, wait a minute. If this is true, this is the biggest story in anyone's lifetime. I mean, contact with alien intelligence. By definition, the biggest story in anyone's lifetime in human history. Why isn't this just totally captivating? And not only was it not totally captivating, it was just barely rising to the level of my being able to pay attention to it. And I view that one as a...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's not that my bullshit detector ever really went off in a big way. It's just the thing never happened. And so I lost interest.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened is the person kept writing a check that he didn't cash. He kept saying, okay, next week, I understand this is sounding spooky and you have no reason to really trust me. But next week, I'm going to put you on a Zoom call with people who you will recognize. And they're going to be former heads of the CIA and people who just, you're going to, within five seconds of being on the Zoom call, you'll know this is not a hoax. I said, great. Just let me know. Just send me the Zoom link. And I went, that happened maybe three times. There was just one phone conversation and then it was just texts, you know, there's just a bunch of texts. And I think Eric spent more time with this person. And I haven't spoken to him about it. I know he spoke about it publicly.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and this is when there was a flurry of activity around this. So there was like a big New Yorker article on UFOs and there was rumors of congressional hearings, I think, coming. And there were the videos that were being debunked or not. And so this person contacted both of us, I think, around the same time. And I think he might have contacted Rogan or other, Eric is just the only person I've spoken to about it, I think, who I know was contacted.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, that you were contacted about. I've got very little to say on this. He has much more to say. I think he went down this rabbit hole further than I did, which wouldn't surprise anyone. He's got much more of a taste for this sort of thing than I do. But I think we're contacted by the same person. It wasn't clear to me who this person was or how this person got my cell phone number. didn't seem like we were getting punked. I mean, the person seemed credible to me.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From what I glean, again, from people who know much more about this than I do, I think we have reason to be skeptical that these techniques of deep learning are actually going to be sufficient to push us into AGI. So it's just not, they're not generalizing in the way they need to. They're not certainly not learning like human children. And so there's brittle and strange ways. It's not just to say that the human path is the only path. And maybe we might learn better lessons by ignoring the way brains work. We know that they don't generalize and use abstraction the way we do. And so”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So I have no, as you know, I'm not a computer scientist, so I have no intuitions about just algorithmically how you would approach that and what's possible.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If what we mean by intelligence, all things considered, and it's truly general, if that scales and Begins to Build upon itself how you maintain that perfect, slavish devotion until the end of time.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that is true, and I think that's scientifically parsimonious to think that that's true. And then you just have to assume we're going to keep making progress. It doesn't have to be any special rate of progress. It doesn't have to be Moore's law. It can just be we just keep going. At a certain point, we're going to be in relationship to minds, leaving consciousness aside. I don't have any reason to believe that they'll necessarily be conscious by virtue of being superintelligent. And that's its own interesting ethical question. Leaving conscience aside. They're going to be more competent than we are. And then that's like the aliens have landed. That's an encounter with, again, leaving aside the possibility that something like Stuart's path is actually available to us. But it is hard to picture”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or is it? It doesn't matter eventually. I have no intuitions on that front apart from the fact that if we continue to make progress, it will come. So it's just, you just have to assume we continue to make progress. There's only two assumptions. You have to assume substrate independence. So there's no reason why this can't be done in silico. It's just we can build arbitrarily intelligent machines. There's nothing magical about having this done in the wetware of our own brains.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's true even before, far before superintelligence, even before general intelligence. I think just the narrow intelligence of these algorithms and of what something like ChatGPT can do. I mean, it's just far short of it developing its own goals that are at cross purposes with ours. Just the unintended consequences of using it in the ways we're going to be incentivized to use it. And the money to be made from scaling this thing. And what it does to our information space and our sense of just being able to get to ground truth of on any facts Yeah, it's super scary. And it's, it's, it'”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's but for some amazing solution of the sort that Stewart is imagining that we could somehow anchor their reward function permanently, no matter how intelligent scales, I think it's really worth worrying about this. I do buy the sci-fi notion that this is an existential risk if we don't do it well.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seem not to be taking the prospect of really creating autonomous superintelligence seriously, like what does that mean? It's every bit as independent and ungovernable ultimately as us having created, I mean, just imagine if we created a race of people that were 10 times smarter than all of us. How would we live with those people? They're 10 times smarter than us, right? They begin to talk about things we don't understand. They begin to want things we don't understand. They begin to view us as obstacles to their solving those problems or gratifying those desires. We become the chickens or the monkeys in their presence. I think that”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They found a hack for that. But anyway, ultimately, there's going to be no looking back. And then the question is. What do we do in relationship to these systems that are more competent than we are in every relevant respect? Because it will be a relationship. It's not like the people who think we're just going to figure this all out without thinking about it in advance is just going to, the solutions are just going to find themselves.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For many relevant forums, like the top 100 things we care about cognitively, I think there's every reason to believe that many of those things, most of those things, A lot like chess or Go, where once the machines get better than we are, they're going to stay better than we are, although they're, I don't know if you caught the recent thing with Go, where this actually came out of Stewart's lab.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every other species on Earth. I mean, you and I don't consciously form the intention to harm insects on a daily basis, but there are many things we could intend to do that would, in fact, harm insects because you decide to repave your driveway or whatever you're doing. You're just not taking the interests of insects into account because they're so far beneath you in terms of your cognitive horizons. So the real challenge here is that If you believe that intelligence scales up on a continuum to toward heights that We can only dimly imagine, and I think there's every reason to believe that there's no reason to believe that we're near the summit of intelligence. And you can define maybe there is... Maybe there are some forms of intelligence for which this is not true, but”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just assuming that these problems are going to solve themselves as we make that final stride into the end zone, or they're saying very... Pollyannish things like an AI would never form a motive to harm human, like why would it ever form a motive to be malicious toward humanity, right? Unless we put that motive in there, right? And that's not the concern. The concern is that in the presence of vast disparities in competence certainly in a condition where the machines are improving themselves, they're improving their own code, they could be developing instrumental goals that are antithetical to our well-being without any intent to harm us. It's analogous to what we do to”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is all revealed preference. And it's what is an AI to make of that? And what should it optimize? This is also Stuart's observation that One of the insidious things about the YouTube algorithm is it's not that it just caters to our preferences. It actually begins to change us in ways so as to make us more predictable. If I could find ways to make us a better reporter of our preferences and to trim our preferences down so that it can further train to that signal. The main concern is Most of the people in the field seem not to be taken intelligence seriously. As they design More and more intelligent machines, and as they profess to want to design true AGI Again, they're not spending the time that Stewart is spending trying to figure out how to do this safely, above all.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's that, and like what humans get a vote, and just what is, what do humans value? What is the difference between what we say we value and our revealed preferences, which if you just, if you were a superintelligent AI that could look at humanity now, I think you could be forgiven for concluding that what we value is driving ourselves crazy with Twitter and living perpetually on the brink of nuclear war and just watching hot girls in yoga pants on TikTok again and again and again.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to make the AI uncertain as to what human values are and perpetually uncertain and always trying to ameliorate that uncertainty by hewing more and more closely to what our professed values are. So it's always interested in us saying, oh, no, no, that's not what we want. That's not what we intend. Stop doing that. No matter how smart it gets, all it wants to do is more perfectly approximate human values. I think there are a lot of problems with that at a high level. I'm not a computer scientist, so I'm sure there are many problems at a low level that I don't understand. Like how to force the human.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He talks about the control problem. And so I just think the idea that we can define a value function in advance that permanently tethers a self-improving superintelligent AI to Our values as we continue to Discover them, refine them, extrapolate them in an open ended way. Think that's a tall order, and I think there are many more ways. There must be many more ways of designing superintelligence that is not aligned in that way and is not ever approximating our values in that way. So Stuart's idea to. It in a very simple way is that. He thinks you don't want to specify the value function up front. You don't want to imagine you could ever write the code in such a way as to admit of no loophole.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What alignment was. Yeah, so Stuart, I mean, Stuart has been probably more than anyone my guru on this topic. I mean, just reading his book and doing, I think I've done two podcasts with him at this point.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet, and unless we find some way of Permanently tether A self, a superintelligent, self-improving AI to our value system. And I don't believe anyone has figured out how to do that or whether that's even possible in principle. I know people like Stuart Russell, who I just had on my podcast, are”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My concern about AGI is unchanged, so I did a, I've spoken about it a bunch on my podcast, but I did a TED talk in 2016, which was the kind of summary of what that conference and various conversations I had after that did to my brain on this topic.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and Elon was very formative in my taking that issue seriously. I mean, he and I went to that initial conference in Puerto Rico together, and it was only because he was going and I found out about it through him and I just wrote his coattails to it that I got dropped in that side of the pool to hear about these concerns at that point.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is difficult because we had an exchange in private, and I want to honor not. Exposing the details of it. Know the details convinced me that there was not a follow-up conversation on that topic.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but no, but where things broke down was not at the point of, oh, there's a lot to talk about, a lot to debate. This is all very interesting. And who knows what's what? It broke down very early at this is There's nothing to talk about here. There's a water bottle on the table or there isn't, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but the issue was that at that, so at the moment, I had this collision with Elon. Certain things were not debatable. It was just absolutely clear where this was going. It wasn't clear how far it was going to go or how quickly we would mitigate it, but it was absolutely clear that it was going to be an issue, right? The train had come off the tracks in Italy. We knew we weren't going to seal our borders. There were already people, there were already cases known to many of us personally in the US at that point And... He was operating by a very different logic that I couldn't engage with.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a fairly long and detailed exchange on this issue. So that intervention didn't work. And it was not done. I was not an asshole. I was just concerned for him, for the world. And then there are other relationships Again, that's an example. We're taking the time didn't work right privately. There are other relations where I thought, okay, there's just going to be more trouble than it's worth. And I just ignored it. And there's a lot of that. And again, I'm not comfortable with how this is all netted out because I don't know if, you know, and I'm not, you know, frankly, I'm not comfortable with how much time in this conversation we've spent talking about these specific people. Like, what good is it for me to talk about Elon or Brett or anything? I think there's a lot of good”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we don't know, but there was no way we weren't going to have. Tens of thousands of deaths at a minimum at that point. And there was every, it was totally rational to be worried about hundreds of thousands. And when Nicholas Kristakis came on my podcast very early, he predicted quite confidently that we would have about a million people dead in the U.S. And that didn't seem, you know, it was, I think, appropriately hedged, but still, it was just like, okay, it's just going to, you just look at the, we're just kind of riding this exponential and... Going to be, you know, it'd be very surprising not to have that order of magnitude and not something much, much less. So anyway, I mean, again, to close the story on Elon. I could see how this was being received, and I tried to get him to walk that back. And then we...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I reached out to him in private. Because it was a private text conversation, I won't talk about the details, but I'm just saying that's a case among the many cases of friends who have public platforms and who did something that I thought was dangerous and ill-considered. This was a case where I reached out in private and tried to help, genuinely help because it was just I thought it was harmful in every sense because it was being misinterpreted and it's like, okay, you can say that panic over anything is dumb, fine, but this was not how this was landed. This was like non-issue, conspiracy. There's going to be no COVID in the US. It's going to peter out. It's just going to become a cold. I mean, that's how this was getting received. Whereas at that moment, it was absolutely obvious how big a deal this was going to be.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the toilet paper was totally wild. On Twitter for that week. I mean, it had more engagement than any other tweet, more than any crazy thing Trump was tweeting. I mean, it went off. Again, it was just a nuclear bomb of information. And I could see that people were responding to it like Wait a minute, okay, here's this genius technologist who must have inside information about everything, right? Surely he knows something that is not on the surface about this pandemic. And they're reading, they were reading into it a lot of information that I knew wasn't there, right? And at the time, I didn't even, I didn't think he had any reason to be suggesting that. I think he was just firing off a tweet, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super early days. Super early. When nobody knew anything, but we saw what was happening in Italy. It was totally kicking off.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, but it was totally coming from a place of love because I was concerned about his reputation. I was concerned about what he, I mean, there was a two-fold concern. I could see what was happening with the tweet. I mean, he had this original tweet that was, I think was panic over COVID is dumb or something like that, right? This is in March, this is early March 2020.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you a free speech absolutist if you can't let a swast sticker show up? I'm not even sure that's an enforceable terms of service, right? There are moments to use swastikers that are not conveying hate and not raising the risk of violence. But so much of what he's doing, given that he's, again, scale matters. He's doing this in front of 130 million people. That's very different than a million people. And that's very different than 100,000 people. And so when I went off the tracks with Elon, he was doing this about COVID. And again, this was a situation where I tried to privately mitigate a friend's behavior And it didn't work out very well.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relationship to real problems in our society. And so my problem with how he's behaved is that he's purported to touch real issues by turns like, okay, do I give the satellites to Ukraine or not? Do I minimize their use of them or not? Should I publicly worry about World War III or not? He's doing this shit on Twitter, right? At the same moment, he's doing these other very impulsive, ill-considered things, and he's not showing any willingness to really clean up the mess he makes. He brings Kanye on, knowing he's an anti-Semite who's got mental health problems, and then kicks him off for a swastika, which I probably wouldn't have kicked him off for a swastika. That's even like, can you really kick people off for swastickers? Is that something that you get back?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's just some gay trist gone awry, right? That's not what it seems. And you link to a Website that previously claimed that Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was campaigning in her place, that thing was exploding in Trumpistan as a conspiracy theory, right? And it was having its effect. And it matters that he was signal boosting it in front of 130 million people. And so it is with saying that your former employee, UL Roth, is a pedophile, right? I mean, it's like that has real consequences. It appeared to be complete bullshit. And now this guy's getting inundated with death threats, right? And Elon, that's all that's totally predictable, right? And he's behaving quite recklessly. And there's a long list of things like that that he's done on Twitter. It's not ethical. It's not good for him. It's not good for the world. It's not serious. It's just a very adolescent relationship.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something very trumpy about how he's acting on Twitter, right? I mean, Twitter, I think Twitter's, he thinks Twitter is great. He bought the place because he thinks it's so great. I think Twitter's driving him crazy, right? I think he's needlessly complicating his life and harming his reputation and creating a lot of noise and harming a lot of other people. I mean, so like he, the thing that I objected to with him on Twitter is not that he bought it and made changes to it. I mean, that was not, again, I remain agnostic as to whether or not he can improve the platform. It was how he was personally behaving on Twitter, not just toward me, but toward the world. I think when you... Forward an article about Nancy Pelosi's husband being attacked not as he was by some lunatic, but”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know. I had a lot of fun with Elon. I like Elon a lot. I mean, Elon I knew as a friend, I like a lot. It's not going to surprise anyone. I mean, he's done and he's continuing to do amazing things. And I think... I think many of his aspirations are realized the world would be a much better place. I think it's just amazing to see what he's built and what he's attempted to build and what he may yet build.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing it for good, they're non psychopaths, trying to get good things done and trying to solve hard problems. And they're not trying to get rich. I mean, many of the people are, it's like, Bad incentives are something. Again, I've uttered that phrase 30 times on this podcast, but it's just almost everywhere it explains normal people creating terrible harm, right? It's not that there are that many bad people. Yes, it makes the truly bad people that much more remarkable and worth paying attention to Bad incentives and the bad The power of bad ideas do much more harm because, I mean, that's what gets good people running in the wrong direction. Doing things that are clearly creating unnecessary suffering.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I worry about all that. But I also do think that most of the people going into those fields and most of the people going into government.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Windfall profits at a time of public health emergency looks bad. It is a bad look. How do we reward and return capital to risk-takers who will spend a billion dollars to design a new drug for a disease that maybe only harms a single digit percentage of the population? What do we want to encourage? And who do we want to get rich? I mean, so the person who cures cancer, do we want that person to get rich or not? We want the person who gave us the iPhone to get rich, but we don't want the person who cures cancer to get rich.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a person who is consciously. Reaping windfall profits on a dangerous vaccine and putting everyone at intolerable risk, or do you think this person was making a good faith attempt to save lives and had no No taint of bad incentives or something”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your reasoning, the style of reasoning matters whether you're right or not. It's like because your style of reasoning is dictating what you're going to do on the next topic.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source