YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Harris

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307
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2023-03-14
most recent
2023-03-14
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Than the kids of other people and to prioritize your energy in that way, right? So you spend all this time trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy, and you'll attend to their minutest concerns and however superficial. And again, there's a genocide raging in Sudan or wherever, and it takes up less than 1% of your bandwidth. I'm not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there. I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest ethically might be optimal because we'll all be doing that and we'll all be doing that in Circumstance where we have certain norms and laws and other structures that force us to be dispassionate. My daughter gets sick, and I have to take her to a hospital.”

    2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Right. I'm not sure what the right answer is there, or even whether there is one right answer. There could be multiple peaks on this part of the moral landscape. So the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama, right? Or really any exponent of classic Buddhism would say that the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers, right? So that you would the mind of the Buddha would be truly dispassionate. You would love and care about all people equally. And by that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing, or at least failure of to fully actualize compassion in the limit or enlightened wisdom in the limit to care more or even and much more about your kids.”

    2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Value in and how we should protect those values. I think reason is the better tool, but it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either. Well, there's a lot.”

    2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So we effortlessly pay attention to that. We care about it. We will donate money toward it. I mean, it's just it marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse. Whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never attended to go to, the numbers don't make a dent. And we find the story boring. We'll change the channel in the face of a genocide. It doesn't matter. And it literally perversely It could be 500,000 little girls have fallen down wells in that country and we still don't care, right? So many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology. And so the empathy plays an unhelpful role there. So ultimately, I think when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and what's worth valid.”

    2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right? So if I tell you, you know, this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well, this is somebody's daughter. You see the parents distraught on television, you hear her cries from the bottom of the well. The whole country stops. I mean, this was an example of this 20, 25 years ago, I think, where it was just wall to wall on CNN. This is just the perfect use of CNN. It was 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of just extracting this girl from a well.”

    2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Kind of emotional contagion, right? Like you feel depressed and I begin to feel depressed along with you because it's just contagious, right? We're so close and I'm so concerned about you and your problems become my problems. And it bleeds through. Right now, I think both of those capacities are very important. emotional contagion piece And this is not really my thesis. This is something I have more or less learned from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy, the emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions. Oh boy. So I'll give you the clear example of this, which is. We”

    2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It depends on what you mean by empathy. There are two at least two kinds of empathy. There's the cognitive form, which is, you know, I would argue even a species of reason. It's just understanding another person's point of view. You understand why they're suffering or why they're happy or just, you have a theory of mind about another human being that is accurate. And so you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively. And then there's another layer entirely, not incompatible with that, but just distinct, which is what people often mean by empathy, which is more”

    2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source