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 mean, pandemics are obviously a complicated problem, but I would consider it much simpler than depression in terms of what's on the menu to be chosen among the various choices.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, depression is a multifactorial problem, and there are different levels at which to influence it. And there are things like meditation, there are things like just life changes. And one of the first things about depression is that when you're depressed, all of the things that would be good for you to do are precisely the things you don't want to do. You don't have any energy to socialize. You don't want to get things done. You don't want to exercise. All of those things, if you got those up and running, they do make you feel better in the aggregate. But the reality is there are clinical level depressions that are so bad that it's just we just don't have good tools for them. And it's not enough to tell there's no life change someone's going to embrace that it's going to be an obvious remedy for that.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In which to interact with it as a problem, right? So there's pharmaceuticals, have whatever promise they have, but there's certainly reason to be concerned that they don't work well for everybody. And it's obvious they don't work well for everybody, but though they do work for some people.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather often, you know, most of the time a species of bullshit, but it's not always wrong, right? There are real conspiracies and there really are just awful Corruptions of, you know, born of bad incentives within our scientific processes, within institutions. And again, we mentioned a lot of these things in passing, but what woke political ideology did to scientific communication during the pandemic was awful and it was really corrosive of public trust, especially on the right. For understandable reasons, it was crazy some of the things that were being said and still is. And these cases are all different. You take depression.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me be clear. I'm not saying you shouldn't do any research, right? I'm not saying that you shouldn't be informed about an issue. I'm not saying you shouldn't read articles on whatever the topic is. And yes, if I got cancer or someone close to me got cancer, I probably would read more about cancer than I've read thus far about cancer. And I've read some. So I'm not making a virtue of ignorance and of blind obedience to authority. And again, I recognize that authorities can discredit themselves or they can be wrong. They can be wrong even when there's no discredit. There's a lot we don't understand about the nature of the world. But still, this vast gulf between truly informed opinion and bullshit exists. It always exists. And conspiracy thinking is.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The doctor who believed that stomach ulcers were not due to stress but were due to H. pylori infections, right? So he just drank a vial of H pylori bacteria and proved and quickly got an ulcer and convinced the field that at minimum H. pyloria was involved in that process. Okay, so yes, everyone was wrong. That doesn't disprove the reality of expertise. It doesn't disprove the utility of relying on experts most of the time, especially in an emergency, especially when the clock is ticking, especially when you're in this particular cockpit and you only have one chance to land this plane. You want the real pilot at the controls.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we defer to it a lot as a labor-saving device and just based on the reality that it's very hard to be a polymath, right? And specialization is a thing, right? And so the people who specialize in a very narrow topic, they know more about that topic than the next guy, no matter how smart that guy or gal is. And that those differences matter, but it's also true. When you're talking about facts, sometimes. The best experts are wrong. The scientific consensus is wrong. You get a sea change in the thinking of a whole field because one person who's an outlier for whatever reason decides, okay, I'm going to prove this point and they prove it, right? So somebody, uh,”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or climate change or the war in Ukraine or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens, right? It's just like she's not a relevant expert on any of those topics. And what's more, she doesn't seem to care, right? And she's living in a culture that has amplified that not carrying into a business model, an effective business model, right? So it's just, and there's something very trumping about all that's the problem is the culture. It's not these specific individuals. So the paradox here is that Expertise is a real thing.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A blind trust in authority. Like if you get cancer. You're talking to one oncologist, and they're recommending some course of treatment. By all means, get a second opinion, get a third opinion, right? But it matters that those opinions are coming from real experts and not from, you know, Robert Kennedy Jr., who's telling you that you got it because you got a vaccine, right? It's just we're swimming in a sea of misinformation where you've got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others who should not have an opinion on these topics. There is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I had, if I had a lot of runway, if I decided, okay, it's really important for me to know everything I can at this point. I know someone's going to get cancer. I may not go back to school and become an oncologist, but what I want to do is I want to know everything I can know about cancer, right? So I'm going to take the next four years and spend most of my time on cancer. Okay, I could do that, right? I still think that's a waste of my time. I still think at the end of even at the end of those four years, I'm not going to be the best person to form into intuitions about what to do in the face of the next cancer that I have to confront. I'm still going to want a better oncologist than I've become to tell me what he or she would do if they were in my shoes or in the shoes of my family member. What I'm not advocating, I'm not advocating a”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The domain of problem that has been visited upon me or my family, right? So if someone close to me gets cancer, I don't pretend to be an oncologist. I don't go out and start reading in journals of oncology and try to really get up to speed as an oncologist because it's... One is a bad and potential and very likely misleading use of my time, right? And it's”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a PhD in neuroscience, right? So I can read a medical journal article and understand a lot of it, right? And so I'm just fairly conversant with medical terminology. And I understand its methods. And I'm alert to the difference because in neuroscience, I've spent hours and hours in journal clubs diagnosing and analyzing the difference between good and bad studies. I'm alert to the difference between good and bad studies in medical journals, right? And I understand that bad studies can get published and, you know, et cetera, and experiments can be poorly designed. I'm alert to all of those things. But when I get sick or when someone close to me gets sick, I don't pretend to be a doctor, right? I've got no clinical experience. I don't go down the rabbit hole on Google for days at a stretch trying to become a doctor, much less a specialist in”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a lot going on where experts and the very concept of expertise have seemed to discredit itself. But the reality is that there is a massive difference. When anything matters, when there is anything to know about anything, there is a massive difference most of the time between someone who has really done the work to understand that domain and someone who hasn't. I get sick or someone close to me gets sick.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The invitation to do your own research when times are good, I view as an invitation to waste your time pointlessly when times are good. Now, the truth is times are not all that good, right? And we have the Ongoing public display of failures of expertise. We have experts who are obviously corrupted by bad incentives. We've got experts who perversely won't admit they were wrong when they, in fact, are demonstrated to be wrong. We've got institutions that have been captured by political ideology that's not truth tracking and this whole woke encroachment into really every place, whether it's universities or science journals or government. I mean, it's just like that has been genuinely deranging.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just foolhardiness, but even in the case of some where you're talking about someone, people like ourselves who are like, we're well educated, we're not the worst possible candidates for the Dunning-Kruger effect when we're going into a new area where we're not experts, we're fairly alert to the possibility that we don't, you know, it's not as simple as things seem at first and we don't know how our tools translate to this new area. We can be fairly circumspect. But we're also, because we're well educated, and we're pretty quick studies. We can learn a lot of things pretty fast, and we can begin to play a language game that sounds fairly expert, right? In that case”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want real experts to be in charge. And we are at 30,000 feet a lot of the time on a lot of issues, right? And whether they're public health issues, whether it's a geopolitical emergency like Ukraine, climate change, I mean, just pick your topic. There are real problems and the clock is rather often ticking and their solutions are non-obvious, right? And so expertise is a thing. And deferring to experts, much of the time makes a lot of sense. At minimum, it prevents A spectacular errors of incompetence and”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real experts are much more reliable than frauds or people who are not experts, right? And expertise really is a thing, right? And when you're flying an airplane in a storm, you don't want just randos come into the cockpit saying, listen, I've got a new idea about how to tweak these controls, right? You want someone who's a trained pilot, and that training gave them something, right? It gave them a set of competences and intuitions, and they know what all those dials and switches do, right? And I don't, right? I shouldn't be flying that plane. So, when things really matter And put in this at 30,000 feet in a storm sharpens this up.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I gotta think that happens less and less now, but some version of that keeps happening and it may always keep happening in every area of expertise, right? It's true that truth is orthogonal to the reputational concerns we have among apes who are talking about the truth. But it is also true that most of the time”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is true to say that the truth or falsity of a statement does not even slightly depend on the credentials of the person making the statement, right? So it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel laureate. You can be wrong. The thing you could, the last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit, right? And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to be right about something or to be right for the wrong reasons or someone just gets lucky. And there are middling cases where you have a backyard astronomer who's got no credentials, but he just loves astronomy and he's got a telescope and he spends a lot of time looking at the night sky. And he discovers a comet that no one else has seen, you know, not even the professional expert.”
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 it's important to acknowledge upfront that there's something paradoxical about how we relate to authority, especially within science. And I don't think that paradox is going away. And it doesn't have to be confusing. It's just, and it's not truly a paradox. It's just like there are different moments in time. It is true to say that Within science or within rationality generally, I mean, whenever you're making having a fact-based discussion about anything”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't have anything to lose who are celebrating it or just are so confused that they just don't even know what's at stake. And then they're the people who we could count on a few hands who have managed to insulate themselves or at least imagine they've insulated themselves from the downside here enough that they're not implicated in the great unraveling we are witnessing or could witness.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to matter because it comes down to what medicines do you give your children, right? Like, we're going to be manufacturing fake journal articles. I mean, I'm sure someone's using ChatGPT for this as we speak. And if it's not persuasive now to most people, I mean, honestly, I don't think we're going to be amazed if it's a year before we can actually create journal articles that would take a PhD to debunk that are completely fake. And there are people who are celebrating this kind of... You know, come in cataclysm, but it's just they're the people who”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do anything. It's like, I mean, you have to know what you think is going to happen. You have to at least give a probabilistic weighting over the future. Otherwise, you're going to be incapacitated by, you're not going to, like, people want certain things and they have to have a rational plan to get those desires gratified. And they don't want to die. They don't want their kids to die. You tell them that there's a comet hurtling toward Earth and they should get outside and look up, right? They're going to do it. And if it turns out it's misinformation, it's...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should be defenestrated because they really are terrible people who are doing dangerous things and for bad reasons. I think we should be honest about what they actually meant in context, right? And this goes to anyone else we might talk about who's more where the case is much more confusing. But yeah, so. Everyone's, it's just so direct, and then I'm sure we're going to get to AI, but the prospect of being able to manufacture clips with AI and deep fakes where it's going to be hard for most people most of the time to even figure out that whether they're in the presence of something real. You know, forget about being divorced from context. There was no context. I mean, that is a misinformation apocalypse that we are right on the cusp of. And that's terrifying.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The truth is, you even need, like, I even give. Trump the benefit of the doubt when I see a clip of Trump because there are famous clips of Trump that are very misleading as to what he was saying in context. And I've been honest about that. Like the whole, you know, there were good people on both sides scandal around his remarks after Charlottesville. The clip that got exported and got promoted by everyone left of center from Biden on down, you know, the New York Times, CNN, there's nobody that I'm aware of who has honestly apologized for what they did with that clip. He did not say what he seemed to be saying in that clip about the Nazis at Charlottesville, right? And I have always been very clear about that. So it's just, you know, Even people who I think should be marginalized and people who”
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 just too tempting to just say something and not know what you're even commenting on. And most of the people who saw that clip don't understand what I actually think about any of these issues. And the irony is people are going to find clips from this conversation that are just as misleading and they're going to export those and then people are going to be dunking on those clips. And, you know, we're all living and dying by clips now. Dysfunctional”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, the people who make those clips know that, right? And they're doing it quite maliciously. And in this case, the person who made that clip and subsequent clips of other podcasts was quite maliciously trying to engineer reputational immolation for me. And being signal boosted by Elon and other prominent people who can't take the time to watch anything other than a clip, even when it's their friend or someone who's ostensibly their friend in that clip, right? So it's a total failure, an understandable failure of ethics that everyone is so short on time and they're so fucking lazy that we now have these contexts in which we react so quickly to things, right? Like Twitter is inviting an instantaneous reaction to this clip that”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was based on, I mean, it was on, I was on somebody's podcast, but that was based on a clip taken from that podcast, which was highly misleading as to the general shape of my remarks on that podcast. I had to then do my own podcast untangling all of that and admitting that even in the full context, I was not speaking especially well and didn't say exactly what I thought in a way that would have been recognizable to anyone, you know, even someone with. Not functioning by a spirit of charity. But the clip was quite distinct from the podcast itself. The reality is that we're living in an environment now where people are so lazy and their attention is so fragmented that they only have time for clips. 99% of people will see a clip and will assume there's no relevant context I need to understand what happened in that clip, 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, and I've also seen the negativity in other people's lives. I mean, it's obvious he's not going to admit it, but I think it's obviously negative for Elon, right? It's just not, that was one of the things that, you know, when I was looking into the Funhouse mirror, I was also seeing the Funhouse mirror on his side of Twitter, and it was just even more exaggerated. It's like, when I was asking myself, why is he spending his time this way? I then reflected on why was I spending my time this way to a lesser degree, right? And at lesser scale, at lesser risk, frankly, right? And so... And it was just so, it's not just Twitter. This isn't part an internet phenomenon. It's like the whole Hunter Biden mess that you... Explored.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next five years, I don't know. I think I'm agnostic as to whether or not he or anyone could make a social media platform that really.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't read too much into that kind of comment. It's like it's just that's just trolling. And it's, you know, I get what's, I get, I understand the fun the person is having on the other side of that. It's like, I do. Well, I do. I mean, I don't behave that way, but I do, and for all I know, that person could be 16 years old, right? So it's like.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's good. One reason why I sucked was Twitter. And I've sent solved that problem. Touch ball 69? Yeah. Touchball 69 should be happy that I suck a little bit less now that I'm off Twitter.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think I was guilty of that definitely. I don't think there's nothing I don't think I ever did anything that I Really feel bad about, but yeah, it was always pushing me to the edge of Snydeness somehow. And it's just not healthy. So the reason why I deleted my Twitter account in the end was that it was obviously making me a worse person. And so, and is there some way to be on there where he's not making me a worse person? I'm sure there is, but it's Given the nature of the platform and given what was coming back at me on it, the way to do that is just to basically use it as a one-way channel of communication, just marketing. It's like, here, here's what I'm paying attention to. Look at it if you want to and just push it out and then you don't look at what's coming back at you.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are analogies that many of us have made. It's like one analogy is road rage, right? Like people behave in the confines of a car in ways that they never would if they didn't have this metal box around them moving at speed. And all of that becomes quite hilarious and obviously dysfunctional when they actually have to stop at the light next to the person they just flipped off. And they realize they didn't understand that the person coming out of that car next to them with cauliflower ear is someone who they never would have You know, rolled their eyes at in public because they would have taken one look at this person and realized this is the last person you want to fight with.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally normal people are capable of being, right? It was like it is a fun house mirror. I was seeing the most grotesque versions of people who I know. People who I know I could sit down at dinner with and they would never behave this way. And yet they were coming at me on Twitter. It was essentially turning ordinary people into sociopaths, right? Like people are just.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I felt like, all right, what's being advertised to me here on a, not just a daily basis, you know, an hourly basis or an increment sometimes or multiple times an hour. I mean, I probably check Twitter. You know, at minimum 10 times a day, and maybe I was checking it a hundred times a day on some days, right, where things were really active and I was really engaged with something Was being delivered into my brain there subtly false information about how dishonest and Just generally unethical.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was noticing that it was insidiously changing the way I felt about people. Both people I know and people I don't know, right? Like people, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter, which just seem insane to me. And then that became a signal I felt like I had to take into account somehow, right? You're seeing people at their worst, both friends and strangers. And I felt that it was as much as I could sort of try to recalibrate for it. I felt that I was losing touch with what was real information because people are performing. People are faking. People are not themselves. You're seeing people at their worst.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's definitely possible. But the question is, and I did that for vast stretches of time, right? But then. The promise of the platform is dialogue and feedback, right? So why am I, if I know... For whatever reason, I'm going to see 99 to 1 awful feedback, you know, bad faith feedback. Malicious feedback. Some of it's probably even bots, and I'm not even aware of who's a person, who's a bot, right? But I'm just going to stare into this funhouse mirror of acrimony and dishonesty that is going to, I mean, the reason why I got off is not because I couldn't recalibrate and find equanimity again with all the nastiness that was coming back at me, and not that I couldn't ignore it for vast rushes of time. I could see that I kept coming back to it, hoping that it would be something that I could use, a real tool for communication.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just as a marketing channel, you just put your stuff out there and you don't look at what's coming back at you. And that's on other social media platforms that I don't even touch. I mean, my team posts stuff on Facebook and on Instagram. I never even see what's on there.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to actually communicate with people. I wanted to hear from the person because, again, it's like being in Afghanistan, right? It's like there are the potted cases where it's obviously good, right? It's like in Afghanistan, the girl who's getting education, that is just here. That's why we're here. That's obviously good. I have those moments on Twitter where it's like, okay, I'm hearing from a smart person who's detected an error I made in my podcast or in a book or They've just got some great idea about something that I should spend time on. And I would never have heard from this person in any other format. And now I'm actually in dialogue with them. And it's fantastic. That's the promise of it, to actually talk to people. And so I kept getting lured back into that. No, the same or, you know, sanity preserving way of using 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 was totally specious, right? It was not something I had to respond to. But yet I would then do a cycle of podcasts responding to that thing that like. Taking my foot out of my mouth or taking someone else's foot out of my mouth, and it became this self-perpetuating. Which I mean, it's, you know, if you're having fun, great. I mean, if it's generative of useful information and engagement professionally and psychologically, great. And there was some of that on Twitter. I mean, there were people who I connected with because I just, you know, one of us DM'd the other on Twitter and it was hard to see how that was going to happen otherwise. It was largely just a machine for manufacturing unnecessary controversy.”
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 usually not that sort of thing, but it's just, but then you look at the kinds of problems people create for themselves. You look at the life deranging and reputation destroying things that people do. And I look at the things that the analogous things that have happened to me. I mean, the things that have really bent my life around professionally over the past decade. So much of it is Twitter. I mean, honestly, in my case, almost 100% of it was Twitter. The controversies I would get into, the things I would think I would have to respond to in a podcast, like I would release a podcast on a certain topic. I would see some blowback on Twitter. It would give me the sense that there was some signal that I really had to respond to. Now that I'm off Twitter, I recognize that most of that was just.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given the impulse it kindles in each of us to reach out to our audience in specific moments and in specific ways there are lots of moments now where I have an opinion about something, but there's nothing for me to do with that opinion, right? Like there's no Twitter, right? So there are lots of things that I would have tweeted. The last months That are not the kind of thing I'm going to do a podcast about. I'm not going to roll out 10 minutes on that topic on my podcast. I'm not going to take the time to really think about it. But had I been on Twitter, I would have reacted to this thing in the news or this thing that somebody did, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is intrinsically fragmenting of time and attention. And now my phone is much less of a presence in my life. And it's not that I don't check Slack or check email. I use it to work. My sense of just what the world is and my sense of my place in the world, the sense of where I exist as a person has changed a lot by deleting my Twitter account. I mean, I had a, and it's just. And the things that I think, I mean, we all know this phenomenon, we say of someone that person's too online, right? Like, what does it mean to be too online? And where do you draw that boundary? How do you know what constitutes being two online? In some sense, just being, I think being on social media at all is to be too online. I mean, given what it does to information it signal boosts and given the”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like one tweet a day, I think I average, but in reality it was like it'd be like four tweets one day and then I wouldn't tweet for the better part of a week. But I was looking a lot because it was my newsfeed. I was just following 200 very smart people and I just wanted to see what they were paying attention to and they would recommend articles and I would read those articles. And then when I would read an article, then I thought I should signal boost. I would tweet. And so all of that seemed good. And that's all separable from all of the odious bullshit that came back at me in response to this, largely in response to this Hunter Biden thing. But even the good stuff has a downside. And it comes at just this point of your phone is this perpetual stimulus of...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think Twitter is as important as people think it is, right? And I used to think it was more important when I was on it. And now that I'm off of it, I think it's... I mean, first, let me say it's just an unambiguously good thing in my experience to leach your Twitter account. It's like it is just, even the good parts of Twitter that I miss were bad in the aggregate, in the degree to which it was fragmenting my attention, the degree to which my life was getting doled out to me in periods Those moments where I check Twitter and had my attention diverted. And I was, you know, I was not a crazy Twitter addict. I mean, I was probably a pretty normal user. I mean, I was not someone who was tweeting multiple times a day or even every day. I think I probably averaged”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know what the right answers are there. The question is what do you do when there are enough in this particular case, religious maniacs, who are willing to die and let their children die in defense of crazy ideas and moral norms that belong in the 7th century? And it's a problem we couldn't solve and we couldn't solve it even though we spent trillions of dollars to solve it.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, there are signs of it working too. You have all the stories of girls now going to school, right? You know, the girls are getting battery acid thrown in their faces by religious maniacs. And then we come in there and we stop that. And now girls are getting educated and that's all good. And our intentions are good there. And we're on the right side of history there. Girls should be going to school. Malala Yosefsai should have the Nobel Prize and she shouldn't have been shot in the face by the Taliban, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responsibility and idealism that America was the kind of nation that should be functioning in this way as the world's cop. And we have to get in there and untangle some of these knots by force rather often because if we don't do it over there, we're going to have to do it over here kind of thing. Yeah, some of that has definitely changed for me in my thinking. Obviously, cultural reasons why it failed in Afghanistan. And if you can't change the culture, it's... Not going to force a change at gunpoint in the culture, or certainly seems that that's not going to happen. And it took us over 20 years to apparently to realize that.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't for want of trying. I have not done a deep dive on all of the failures there. And maybe all of these failures are failures in principle. Maybe it's just not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions. But yeah, the move to Iraq always seemed questionable to me. When we knew the problem, the immediate problem at that moment, Al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan and then bouncing to Pakistan. Anyway, you know, so yes, but my sense of the possibility of nation building, my sense of insofar as the neocon.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source