Political Ramblings: On Disagreement and the Role of Values and Dispositions in Forging Different Factual Understanding of the World

I have long been anthropologically curious about the people who identify as scientific rationalists or Bayesians and politically identify as “centrists” and “moderates” or belong to the faction of socially liberalish “libertarians” (many of whom are happy also to identify as “centrists” or “moderates” or, in recent times, “neoliberals”). For about two years, I have occasionally looked at the public Facebook of Eliezer Yudkowsky and read the discussions of the S.V. “rationalists” who comment on his posts. On Twitter, I look somewhat regularly at his feed, along with that of Robin Hanson (I psychologically couldn’t stand following either of these men (seeing their tweets in real time), but I read the stuff they re-tweet or tweet every now and then)), along with that of Scott Alexander (even if he doesn’t tweet often), and I follow Julia Galef, and I also recently came to follow this moderate libertarian called Cathy Young (she is reasonable enough of the time to be tolerable, and more often than not criticises people I would criticise in much the same terms). I have followed Steven Pinker ever since I revived my Twitter account in, I think, early 2015 (whenever it was). (Steven Pinker is different from the rest of these people from my perspective since I just think he is far more interesting and knowledgeable, often tweeting interesting articles on a range of different topics (even if he sometimes tweets stuff I think is super dodgy) and refusing to use the medium for tribal sniping. He’s also different in the respect that I have a certain degree of respect for him as an academic totally outside of the internet context, having read and enjoyed all of his books except The Sense of Style (I have plenty of criticisms of The Better Angels but you can find these elsewhere on my blog with a bit of searching, and I also think The Blank Slate has major flaws but now is not the time for my thoughts on his philosophy of biology, given that I have also written about that elsewhere), and being in possession of an appreciation for his research in linguistics and cognitive science. He’s also different in the respect that he definitely isn’t a full-blown loony economic-libertarian like Yudkowsky seems to be and Galef might be (Galef is perhaps economically very agnostic, there are few indications). Further, Pinker doesn’t talk constantly about “signalling” and “Pareto distributions” like the Yudkowsky-Galef-Hanson gang (I’ve gotta say that this econbabble just creeps me out). Scott Alexander is also somewhat of an outlier at least insofar as I have enjoyed some of his blogposts, whereas I haven’t derived much insight or enjoyment from stuff written by Julia Galef, Robin Hanson or Eliezer Yudkowsky). I also keep tabs on the entrepreneurial psych graduate with slightly too strong views on gender differences, Claire Lehmann, and the puerile, edgelord evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, as well as his partner, the “sexologist” and vegan, Dianna Fleischmann. I also keep occasional tabs on a man I believe to be a very creepy and irrational person with horrible views called Bryan Caplan, who seems to have a strong relationship with Yudkowsky and Hanson (Hanson works at the same Koch brothers-supported institution as Caplan, the economic-libertarian stronghold, George Mason University). (Incidentally, I may soon write a brief demolition of an insanely stupid and ridiculous philosophy-of-science blogpost Caplan wrote several months ago comparing basic economics to anatomy (it is wrong on every possible level, factually and conceptually moronic), a post which happened to be retweeted by Mr. Yudkowsky.) I also follow Nicholas Christakis, who may be ideologically not too different from me (my exposure to him outside of Twitter strongly inclines me to like him and view him as intelligent and decent), but whose Twitter activity looks, for the most part, like that of someone within the emerging Quillette orbit (Bret Weinstein is a very, very similar case (really smart and decent-seeming outside of Twitter but distasteful (to my mind) on it); I stopped following Bret when he proclaimed that genocide and rape were adaptive (I was also sick of the stanning for Ben Shapiro and J. Peterson (obviously, this makes sense from the point of view of generating followers but I couldn’t stand it))). I also follow Noah Smith, who seems like he has a long association with Yudkowsky, Galef and Hanson (and also the very prominent libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, who is connected to these other figures), although he seems to be much more of a conventional progressive (a conventional Democrat) than these others I’m mentioning. I also follow Rolf Degen, this (apparently) libertarian dude who spends a huge amount of time writing short pithy summaries of papers in psychology and social science, inserting a lot of strong opinions about PC and so on (I should clarify that I think he’s a good and entertaining follow, even if I suspect he has questionable attitudes about sex and gender and such).  I also keep tabs on Jonathan Haidt (much of what I would say about that guy was already said by Massimo Pigliucci on blogs several years back). I have also long kept tabs on that irritating, nasty buffoon Michael Shermer (Pigliucci wrote some stuff on him back in the idea that holds up). And I also keep tabs on the insane clown known as Jordan Peterson (a man who is clearly not a scientific rationalist but who claims the mantle nonetheless (given his attraction to pseudoscience and counter-Enlightenment mysticism, his fervent opposition to “Postmodernism” is hilarious to me)).

Last but not least, I’ve a long-standing vendetta with Sam Harris. More on him in just a minute.

I’ve tried my best to understand the centrist rationalist and empathise with her point of view, but I must admit that I just get endlessly frustrated with the fact that she never seems to talk about issues that I think are vitally important to talk about. These are issues like nuclear annihilation and sabre-rattling with North Korea, climate breakdown, soil erosion and salinization, air pollution, ocean pollution, overfishing, forest loss, habitat loss, extreme weather events, species extinction, the methane eruption taking place in the Arctic, the health and diet of American citizens, American poverty, how difficult it is to be an American on food stamps (“American” because I’m thinking almost exclusively about Americans (as you may have noted)), massive racial inequalities in education and health, mass incarceration and the horrors of the private prison system, atrocities committed by the US government, atrocities committed by Israel, the famine in the Horn of Africa, fraudulent and larcenous behaviour on Wall St, obscene Wall St bonuses, the financialisation of the US economy, the civilian toll of recent US bombings and Obama’s drone assassinations, dangerous jingoistic attitudes among the US public, the lies of “Free Trade” and the severe toll of IMF liberalisation and the “Washington Consensus” (Neoliberalism) in many developing countries around the world including Russia, sexism and misogyny in popular culture and pornography and as manifested in sexual harassment… and instead choose to spend most of their time criticising SJW dogmas and worrying about “free speech” issues (Jesse Singal is someone who I politically strongly identify with who has tweeted and written about this stuff I just mentioned really intelligently in a careful and considerate way (he’s writing a book on social justice activism), and he’s not who I’m talking about). Basically, it just inclines me to a deep moral suspicion. For example, I just can’t help finding something slightly distasteful about the fact that someone with a public profile would spend their time discussing such petty political issues as women mocking men who wear cargo shorts (this is a real Galef tweet subject, typical of her consistently anti-feminist output). Obviously, most of the figures I mentioned above would smirk or sneer at most of the issues I mentioned, since they disagree with me about what is actually going on in the world and how the world works (what is worth worrying about). But I strongly suspect that, at root, this has a lot to do with a gulf in values anyhow. Why? Well, I think that our values, psychological dispositions and personality can lead us to acquire very different perspectives on the world, since these factors strongly affect what we actually choose to spend our time learning about. I think the vast majority of these figures haven’t read – and probably won’t read – the books that have influenced my political worldview, like Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents or The Price of Inequality, or The Essential Chomsky or Who Rules the World? by Chomsky, or Collapse by Jared Diamond, or Flannery’s The Future Eaters, or the Peter Turchin canon, or Limits to Growth: the Thirty-Year Update, or Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics, or Gerry Mackie’s Democracy Defended, or Peter Wadhams’ A Farewell to Ice, and they don’t read George Monbiot columns and they’re not friends with the people I’m friends with and they don’t subscribe to the Youtube channels I subscribe to, and most of them aren’t camping-loving hippies like me with a strong affection for wild spaces and a consequent attitude of profound disgust and hatred towards those mega-corporations whose pollutants destroy ecosystems of great beauty and biological importance, and they don’t weep for the suffering of the impoverished and downtrodden and the sick, and they are not deeply moved by the first track of Sufjan Stevens’ album Michigan – I could go on. Meanwhile, I have not read the things they have, and had the experiences they have had. This has determined a lot.

I think one of the key ways in which many of these people are irrational is that they seem blind (many of them) to the way their psychological dispositions have shaped their political outlook, whereas I am not.

Anyhow, I also have high confidence in one prediction of mine that most of the figures mentioned would not make: global progress in life expectancy and health outcomes will stagnate or reverse within the next two to us three decades due to us reaching a tipping point in soil loss and pesticide overuse and the ravages of increased extreme weather events. (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/the-environment-versus-silliness-no.html).
We’ll see 😉

Onto Sam Harris, for fun. I have a very low view of Sam Harris, as I've made clear in a previous blogpost (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/11/a-slapdash-bricolage-of-reasons-to-hate.html). I have long been infuriated by how some Harris fans are smart enough to recognise a mediocre critique of Harris (and yes, obviously, no doubt, he has been very sloppily and unfairly smeared a great deal (to what extent this smearing is unusual for a public figure is not clear to me though, even if it is definitely a bad thing, as all smearing is)), but not smart enough to realise his major cognitive bugs nevertheless. He is a sloppy thinker who says silly and crude things; I document many of these things in that post. I am unfortunately resigned to the attitude that if you don't have this view of Harris after having properly read and digested a fair portion of the sub-sophomore-level material he has written on questions of morality, on religion, on crime, on race, on 'free speech' and on 'spirituality', you are intellectually my inferior and not the sort of person I want to interact with. Unless you are 17 or younger – then you might be redeemable. 

If a Harris fan who appeared pleasant enough in respects other than being a Harris fan pressed me on those last two sentences there, I would say that I was employing hyperbolic rhetoric, even though that is basically how I feel. Of course, on reflection, I do strongly suspect that some of the 17+ year-olds are redeemable even by my own misanthropic lights, and I do at least realise that Sam Harris is not even close to the most repugnant talking head with a big internet following (at least he’s not Stefan Molyneux or Sargon of Akkad). I do at least acknowledge that we have some common ground, insofar as we are both Atheists, and are both abstractly, verbally committed to being "reasonable" and "rational" and paying fealty to institutionally bona fide science in our pursuit to understand the world. We also have common ground insofar as we are both intellectually curious about a wide range of things. And I like some of the people he invited on his podcast; most of them are worth talking to, at any rate. 

But that doesn't really change the fact that I find the combination of self-importance, spurious thinking and racism that the man exhibits intensely irritating. Perhaps it's a personal defect of mine, but I think I am far more enraged and outraged by the man who is a pretender to the name of scientific rationalist, who uses this mantle to espouse crude and often racist or immoral notions, than the total irrationalist and mystic. It’s even worse if the pretend rationalist has a lot of sycophantic supporters who are absolutely convinced that the man is highly rational (and also "eloquent" and "highly logical" and so on), as Harris does. It probably is a defect. Then again, I do genuinely think that Harris holds very distasteful views: the racial-profiling stuff (never motivated by expert opinion, which was against); the ridiculous, unsupported nonsense about America being a clumsy "well-intentioned giant" (he is usually extremely scant on evidence in the domain of politics, which is very evident in the Chomsky emails (not that his epigones are even capable of noticing this)); the rhetoric about white nationalists being truth-tellers about Islam; the Motte and Bailey dancing that he constantly resorts to when defending his edgy-thought-experiment-based political oeuvre ("Classic regressive leftist, not understanding that I was just using that thought experiment like people do in philosophy seminars, to probe and push our intuitions, to try to see if there is an abstract principle to back them up" (even though I am using these thought experiments in the context of making political arguments and proposing concrete reforms, and their inclusion would be utterly random and bizarre if I didn't think they had some significance beyond this very abstract theoretical purpose)); the love affairs with really dodgy people who reinforce his Islamophobic views (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/04/11/4651763.htm, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man, https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali); the apparent recent acceptance of the whole box-and-dice of the Charles Murray perspective on race and intelligence (please see these on why this is intellectually wrong-headed: https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/05/solving-race.html, http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html); the nonsense about the Israeli army being humane (see original link for citation and discussion, and please see this website also: https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/); the lingering pussy-footing ambivalence about the Iraq War, despite its awesome destructiveness and horror (he may now be rhetorically condemnatory, but I remember that when the Rubin Report was just starting out, he expressed a very clearly ambivalent attitude, when asked by that clown-looking dullard if he was a “neocon” (check this out for yourself, if you can find it)); and, generally, the value system that motivates him to focus on the shit that he does focus on, when he could, e.g., focus on climate breakdown and pollution, or American poverty and disease, or promotion of peace activism.

Now that I’ve finished bitching and moaning, here’s a list of people whose way of analysing the political and economic world doesn’t annoy me:

Basically all the people in the Evonomics orbit, but Peter Turchin and David Sloan Wilson in particular (also used to be a huge Steve Keen admirer but have somewhat lost patience with his cocky rhetoric and the way he portrays the economics profession), Jared Diamond, Ann Pettifor, Joe Stiglitz, George Monbiot, Jesse Singal (my favourite person on Twitter, bar none), the Chapo people (I enjoy two out of every three of their episodes; I can’t fully get on board with everything they say, and I think they are more tribally left than me and less scientifically-minded), Chomsky, Barrett Brown (on board with the misanthropy), and Glenn Greenwald (this guy is anti-tribal to his core, and I fucking love it, being myself likewise with somewhat similar ideas about the world (though I doubt that my libertarian feelings are quite as strong as his, and I couldn’t motivate myself to focus on these issues like he has)).

In some ways, this is kind of a motley crew, but that reflects the fact that I don’t in fact belong to any tribe. The commonalities that do exist tell you a great deal about my values and how I think the world works. I personally think that these people are, if you average them out, just about as rational in evaluating evidence and following logical implications as the figures I mentioned at the start, even though they tend to be much more ‘left’. Which means that the dominance of the popular “rationalist” and “sceptic” movements on the internet by “centrists” and libertarians possess on the internet is by no means a state of affairs dictated by Reason itself. And I think we – whoever wants to join me – need to overturn this hegemony.

Maybe one of the best, simple presentations of fallacies in dumb scientism about ethics (the scientism of extreme simpletons like Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, etc)

Phillip Kitcher's 1994 paper dismantling E.O. Wilson's program of biologicizing ethics: Just a neat presentation of the ancient arguments that defeat dumb scientistic, logic-denying positions on ethics 

http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/167win10/kitcher%20-%20four%20ways%20of%20biologicizing%20ethics.pdf

From Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, edited by Elliot Sober

These dumb fucks will never stop ignoring Hume. They will never learn.

A Slapdash Bricolage of Reasons to Hate Sam Harris (mostly links to other critiques)

Why I do Criticise (and Despise) Samuel Harris

I think Sam Harris is highly intellectually lazy, appallingly illiterate (for a public ‘intellectual’, especially such a brash and vociferous one), highly delusional about his own rationality, unjustifiably arrogant in general, a very facile thinker, and an extremely specious, incompetent arguer. I do not think of them as an intelligent man, but an intellectual fraud. Incidentally, most of his acclaim and celebrity derives from young male fools between the ages of 13 and 20. He is the intellectual icon of pubescent male imbeciles.

In my time, I have gathered together a vast number of articles on Sam Harris’ intellectual and moral failings, and I have grouped them under headlines below, with accompanying thoughts. What follows is poorly structured and uneven, but it is still better than anything ever produced by Sam Harris (this is a joke).

Harris Taking Audaciously Strong Philosophical Stances without Serious Argument (The Moral Landscape and Free Will):

In his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris argues that utilitarianism is right[1]; and that morality is objective and can be made scientific and empirical, by becoming (literally) a branch of neuroscience (which he claims will provide us with profound new insights into right and wrong, and will be able to cast a decisive vote on various fundamental dilemmas (giving the key to both explaining why FGM is wrong, and why US foreign policy is fine)). As it happens, the book is utterly atrocious, and his attempt to defend these idiotic theses is dismal.

Not all of the following reviews of this book exactly agree, and I don’t think I exactly exactly agree with any one of them. But together they paint a devastatingly clear picture of just how unbelievably sloppy, stupid, crass and arrogant Harris’ book really is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Appiah-t.html
http://www.artisresearch.com/articles/Atran_Sam_Harriss_Guide.pdf

https://newhumanist.org.uk/2538/test-tube-truths

https://newrepublic.com/article/78546/the-facts-fetish-morality-science

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/blackburn-ethics-without-god-secularism-religion-sam-harris

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703882404575520062380030080

http://counterpoint.uchicago.edu/morals.html

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/05/12/science-right-and-wrong/

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com.au/2010/04/about-sam-harris-claim-that-science-can.html

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/be-wary-of-the-righteous-rationalist-we-should-reject-sam-harriss-claim-that-science-can-be-a-moral-guidepost/

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/the-moral-landscape

In 2012, Sam Harris published a monograph called Free Will in which he defends incompatibilism and the view that “free will is an illusion”, but without engaging seriously with any philosophical literature or indeed any serious counter-arguments whatsoever. Daniel Dennett wrote a sterling, highly scathing review of this stain on philosophy:

https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/reflections-on-free-will

Sam Harris’ Views on Foreign Policy, World Affairs and Islam:

One of the many reasons why Harris’ infamous email exchange with Chomsky should be considered as nothing more than a total humiliation for the party under discussion is that, in the correspondence (or battering), Harris doesn’t make a single argument that Chomsky hadn’t answered in print countless times going back literally decades. Harris only has one point to make, that we should make exceptions for US war crimes because of his state’s “benign intentions”. But even if Harris had even just read Chomsky’s famous 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”, he’d have answers to his concerns. Consider this passage from near the end of Chomsky’s famous piece:

“AS A FINAL EXAMPLE of this failure of skepticism, consider the remarks of Henry Kissinger in his concluding remarks at the Harvard-Oxford television debate on America’s Vietnam policies. He observed, rather sadly, that what disturbs him most is that others question not our judgment, but our motives—a remarkable comment by a man whose professional concern is political analysis, that is, analysis of the actions of governments in terms of motives that are unexpressed in official propaganda and perhaps only dimly perceived by those whose acts they govern. No one would be disturbed by an analysis of the political behavior of the Russians, French, or Tanzanians questioning their motives and interpreting their actions by the long-range interests concealed behind their official rhetoric. But it is an article of faith that American motives are pure, and not subject to analysis (see note ¹). Although it is nothing new in American intellectual history—or, for that matter, in the general history of imperialist apologia—this innocence becomes increasingly distasteful as the power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs, and more capable, therefore, of the unconstrained viciousness that the mass media present to us each day. We are hardly the first power in history to combine material interests, great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery of the lower orders. The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.”

If Harris had read just one passage like this, he would have seen that there was no point to the debate, because he would have realised that Chomsky has been facing this same kind of objection to his radical foreign policy stance (usually in far more sophisticated form) going all the way back to the very beginning of his political-activist turn. And it is Chomsky’s utter disgust to have to engage with Harris’ trite, incompetently presented arguments which explains the tone of complete contempt he adopts with Harris throughout the exchange, reaching a peak in the vicious mordancy of the longest email he sends:

“I am sorry you are unwilling to retract your false claim that I “ignore the moral significance of intentions.” Of course I did, as you know.  Also, I gave the appropriate answer, which applies accurately to you in the al-Shifa case, the very case in question.

If you had read further before launching your accusations, the usual procedure in work intended to be serious, you would have discovered that I also reviewed the substantial evidence about the very sincere intentions of Japanese fascists while they were devastating China, Hitler in the Sudetenland and Poland, etc.  There is at least as much reason to suppose that they were sincere as Clinton was when he bombed al-Shifa.  Much more so in fact.  Therefore, if you believe what you are saying, you should be justifying their actions as well.  I also reviewed other cases, pointing out that professing benign intentions is the norm for those who carry out atrocities and crimes, perhaps sincerely – and surely more plausibly than in this case.  And that only the most abject apologists justify the actions on the grounds that perpetrators are adopting the normal stance of criminals.

I am also sorry that you evade the fact that your charge of “moral equivalence” was flatly false, as you know.

And in particular, I am sorry to see your total refusal to respond to the question raised at the outset of the piece you quoted.  The scenario you describe here is, I’m afraid, so ludicrous as to be embarrassing.  It hasn’t even the remotest relation to Clinton’s decision to bomb al-Shifa – not because they had suddenly discovered anything remotely like what you fantasize here, or for that matter any credible evidence at all, and by sheer coincidence, immediately after the Embassy bombings for which it was retaliation, as widely acknowledged.  That is truly scandalous.

And of course they knew that there would be major casualties.  They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?

In fact, as you would know if you deigned to read before launching accusations, they were informed at once by Kenneth Roth of HRW about the impending humanitarian catastrophe, already underway.  And of course they had far more information available than HRW did.

Your own moral stance is revealed even further by your complete lack of concern about the apparently huge casualties and the refusal even to investigate them.

As for Clinton and associates being “genuine humanitarians,” perhaps that explains why they were imposing sanctions on Iraq so murderous that both of the highly respected international diplomats who administered the “Oil for food” program resigned in protest because they regarded them as “genocidal,” condemning Clinton for blocking testimony at the UN Security Council.  Or why he poured arms into Turkey as it was carrying out a horrendous attack on its Kurdish population, one of the worst crimes of the ‘90s.  Or why he shifted Turkey from leading recipient of arms worldwide (Israel-Egypt excepted) to Colombia, as soon as the Turkish atrocities achieved their goal and while Colombia was leading the hemisphere by far in atrocious human rights violations.  Or why he authorized the Texaco Oil Company to provide oil to the murderous Haitian junta in violation of sanctions.  And on, and on, as you could learn if you bothered to read before launching accusations and professing to talk about “ethics” and “morality.”

I’ve seen apologetics for atrocities before, but rarely at this level – not to speak of the refusal to withdraw false charges, a minor fault in comparison.

Since you profess to be concerned about “God-intoxicated sociopaths,” perhaps you can refer me to your condemnation of the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium because God had instructed him that he must smite the enemy.

No point wasting time on your unwillingness to respond to my request that you reciprocate by referring me to what I have written citing your published views.  If there is anything I’ve written that is remotely as erroneous as this – putting aside moral judgments – I’ll be happy to correct it.

Plainly there is no point pretending to have a rational discussion.  But I do think you would do your readers a favor if you presented your tale about why Clinton bombed al-Shifa and his grand humanitarianism.  That is surely the least you can do, given your refusal to withdraw what you know to be completely false charges and a display of moral and ethical righteousness.”

As Harris admits in the exchange, he had indeed done no reading on Chomsky beyond Chomsky’s essay on 9/11. As Chomsky might say, “this is scandalous”. Even leaving aside the incredible intellectual laziness and arrogance of this failure to read up on his rival’s voluminous writings (and voluminous published speech- and interview transcripts), it was extremely imprudent. After all, Chomsky’s IQ is two standard deviations above Harris’ and he is far more erudite and far more knowledgeable. Harris should have known that he was going to get an almighty ass-whooping. The reality is, of course, that Harris wasn’t even equipped with the intellectual tools to understand Chomsky’s position. He clearly didn’t (and doesn’t) understand Chomsky’s ‘Leninist’ views about the dominant role of the military-industrial complex and the interests of US capital in determining foreign policy and foreign policy objectives for the US state (Chomsky, like all left-wing radicals, is an exponent of institutional analysis and sees world affairs as a complex interplay of various competing institutional incentives, with individuals being little more than cogs, and “intention” certainly not being an individualistic affair (it doesn’t matter if Bill Clinton is a good man or not)). Harris clearly didn’t (and doesn’t) understand Chomsky’s historical perspective on US atrocities and their propagandistic analysis by patriotic intellectuals; Harris clearly hadn’t read Chomsky’s endless tracts about how US imperialism is not all that different from that of the British Empire or other empires form history, and how the intelligentsia within imperialist regimes always employ the same propaganda and take the same highly hypocritical stances, failing to apply even a semblance of moral consistency in analysis (Chomsky has often discussed John Stuart Mill’s writings about the unprecedented enlightened justice of the British occupation of India). In fact, it seems to me highly likely that Harris was (and is) just massively ignorant about the things his state has actually done in the world since 1950: in particular, the devastation his great nation has wreaked in South-East Asia, Central America and the Middle East, resulting in roughly 40 million deaths (a conservative estimate) [http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066]. I find it hard to believe that Harris would hold the views he does (“US is a well-intentioned giant”) if he knew the true horrors of Agent Orange and the US bombings in Vietnam, and the vast numbers of civilian deaths caused by his great benevolent nation; if he knew the facts about the US carpet bombings of Cambodia and Laos, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and led directly (in Cambodia) to the rise of Pol Pot; if he knew about the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor and genocide; if he knew what it was like to be a Palestinian living in the hellscape of the Gaza strip; if he knew about the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company; if he knew about the obstruction of democracy in Chile culminating in the 1973 CIA-backed coup which established Augusto Pinochet’s murderous military dictatorship (a dictatorship which was advised on economics by Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys); if he knew about the obstruction of democracy in El Salvador throughout the 1970s; if he knew about the US support from 1979 of the deadly right-wing Contras against the economically successful left-wing socialist Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government in Nicaragua; if he knew about the invasion of Panama in December 1989; if he knew about the immensely destructive consequences of the ‘liberalisation’ policies foisted on the Third World and post-Soviet Russia by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, organisations run in the interests of US finance capital; if he knew about the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, which resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and led to a brutal response by Serbian forces on the ground; if he knew the massively counterproductive and horrifying consequences of the War in Afghanistan (“Operation Enduring Freedom”); and if he knew the reality of the Iraq War, in the main three-year phase of which possibly 665,000 Iraqis died (etc).

The fact that Harris did initiate this dialogue with Chomsky in such a state of abject ignorance has always pissed me off.  Did Harris really think that his asinine counterfactual thought experiments (imagine if circumstances were radically different from the actual circumstances in which the bad act occurred (and the bad act is ever likely to occur), then maybe the act would be morally justified) and his repetitive employment of the word “intention” (and refusing to actually engage with statistics, facts and evidence, refusing to even enable the falsification of his treasured assumption of US state-benignity) was going to change Chomsky’s mind? Was he really that arrogant? Was he really that deranged?

The most bizarre thing about the exchange is, of course, that Sam Harris adopts an outright anti-utilitarian, anti-consequentialist position in order to conduct his apologetics for the US, effectively saying that statistics of dead and maimed, and facts about the devastating consequences of US bombings and invasions, don’t matter. This blatant contradiction of the stance he takes in The Moral Landscape represents irrationality and hypocrisy at an almost unbelievable extreme.

Harris has clearly never made any effort to try to adopt the perspective of a non-American, in order to avoid the abject moral hypocrisy that characterises the imperialist attitude. Harris has clearly never considered how his views might differ if he were raised in the Middle East – whether he might care about violations of International Law, perhaps, and be angry at US war crimes. Harris has never considered how he might react if an ‘Arab’ writer suggested that a nuclear first strike on the US should be seriously considered. Harris has never adopted the perspective of anyone other than US government officials and US or Israeli soldiers. He is the ultimate propagandist.

Here are two articles on the Harris-Chomsky exchange from authors who share similar views to mine:

http://www.alternet.org/books/what-happened-when-sam-harris-tried-and-failed-embarrass-noam-chomsky

https://newmatilda.com/2015/05/16/noam-chomsky-and-sam-harris-revealing-lesson-religious-fundamentalism/.

Here are articles on Harris’ view of Islam, foreign policy and world affairs generally (the first two are by a guy called Theodore Sayeed, whom I think is brilliant):

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/sam-harris-uncovered.html

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/09/sam-harris-in-full-court-intellectual-mystic-and-supporter-of-the-iraq-war/

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/28/sam_harriss_detestable_crusade_how_his_latest_anti_islam_tract_reveals_the_bankruptcy_of_his_ideas/

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/07/my_secret_debate_with_sam_harris_a_revealing_4_hour_dialogue_on_islam_racism_free_speech_hypocrisy/

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/10/sam_harris_dangerous_new_idiocy_incoherent_islamophobic_and_simply_immoral/

https://evolution-institute.org/article/here-he-goes-again-sam-harriss-falsehoods/

Finally, here’s an article specifically on Harris’ laughable Israel podcast, written by Sayeed again:

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/defends-silence-slaughter/

I also want to say something about this podcast. Mercifully, it will be quite brief.

When I first read the transcript of “Why I don’t Criticise Israel”, I was shocked: it is entirely factless, no-skin-in-the-game, hollow, smarmy, massively distortionary, moralising BS. That is to say, it is complete intellectual trash. People trying to defend Israeli atrocities resolutely avoid statistics (or include statistics highly selectively), but in this podcast Harris goes to the extreme of talking about the conflict without including any statistics at all. Of course, this failure makes perfect sense; the statistics are horrifying and blood-curdling without ornament or embellishment, and no amount of casuistry can alter their awesome effect. Now, I’m not saying that Harris thought about including statistics and then backtracked because he realised they were inimical to his position, but I think that it is absurd to make the claims Harris does without sourced evidential support in any case. And the defence that Harris actually musters of Israel is another one of his astonishingly moronic counterfactual thought experiments. Literally the argument goes like this: Israel’s atrocities are defensible because if Hamas, overnight, somehow came into possession of Israel’s weapon capabilities, they’d probably do something way worse. This is so bizarrely stupid and irrational. One cannot even begin to understand the nature and dynamics of the conflict, or its horror, without understanding the massive power and military imbalance. Imagining that the imbalance didn’t exist in order to defend Israel is deranged. It’s like defending the US invasion of Vietnam by suggesting that if the Vietcong had the weaponry at LBJ’s or Nixon’s disposal then America would have been bombed even more viciously. It is completely irrelevant – it is featherbrained propaganda.

One More Thing:

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/why_does_anyone_take_sam_harris_seriously/

The title raises a pertinent question. I contend that we know the answer:

Because there are drooling imbeciles with even more catastrophic cognitive disabilities than Harris himself: his fans. They are everywhere on the internet, and they spread further every day. I fear for this species.

---

[1] Although he’s not clear on what kind of utilitarian is right; he simply adopts an extremely vague half-rule-half-act, sub-Millian utilitarianism which conveniently spits out his pre-formed moral views (enabled by the vagueness).

An Essay called "My Surprisingly Novel Thoughts on the Freedom of the Will"

My Surprisingly Novel Thoughts on the Freedom of the Will

The mainstream, secular debate about free-will is a verbal dispute: it boils down to a question of framing. The debate happens under shared beliefs about the nature of the mind and the physical laws that give rise to it, as well as shared beliefs about the results of famous experiments (the Libet experiments) and recent work in neuroscience. This means there can’t be a “further fact” in dispute (indeed, a logical positivist would probably say there ought to be no debate at all). The only thing in dispute is how we should conceive of the concept of free will -- more specifically, whether there is a sensible way of modifying the traditional/religious or intuitive 'concept' such that it is compatible with the scientific facts, or whether there is no such sensible way because the idea of free will is an *inherently* superstitious concept that sits in irrevocable conflict with the facts. This is a question of framing.

Of the two framings that do exist in this debate, it seems to me that the “incompatibilist” framing is more popular among secularists than the “compatibilist” one. I think there are obvious reasons why one might expect this, despite the fact that we are all intuitive “libertarians” about the will. If you do take the word “freedom” in anything like our intuitive sense of it, the notion of free will is clearly absurd.

First of all, as soon as you dispense with the Cartesian Ego, you conclude that the mind must come from the brain (and only the brain), and that this hunk of matter must be subject to the bio-chemical-physical laws of our universe, just as all things are. This means that everything in your mind must be determined by these laws, including every aspect of your personality (whether you are good, bad, violent, non-violent, smart, dumb, rational, irrational, sane, insane, sociable, solitary) and all the decisions you make. There may well appear to be a division between the voluntary and the involuntary (we say addiction makes people zombies, for example), but it is more or less illusory. This means that when we deem murderers sane according to clinical standards – thereby implying they had a choice whether or not to kill their victim – we’re probably making some kind of error. There are, to be sure, degrees of insanity; some murderers might have genuinely weighed up the options, and experienced hesitation or regrets. However, even for these murderers, the deliberation was done according to fixed natural laws inside their brain. The reason a particular man ends up committing murder and his cousin doesn’t is almost certainly due to some slight abnormality in the man’s brain (caused by a bad set of genes, or a bad environment that led to the expression of bad phenotypes, or some kind of braindamage from physical trauma or drug abuse (probably also combined with bad genes and a bad environment)). There is no mysterious Will that somehow disrupts the natural processes going on in the brain and produces a truly spontaneous action (in any case, would the Will really be you, or just some part of you?). It may be true that quantum mechanics – the laws at the bottom of reality – are not deterministic but probabilistic, and seem to produce utterly random outcomes. While this suggests that your decisions were not predetermined from the moment of the Big Bang (which seems to be slightly more reassuring than believing they were), it still means your decisions have nothing to do with you (whatever “you” is).

Secondly, you (whatever “you” is) have absolutely no control over the vast majority of things that shaped and shape you (genetic and environmental): you don't choose your parents, your uterine environment, your general infantile environment, your city, your state or your nation, your infantile and childhood diet, the quality of the air you breathe, your parents' wealth, the size of your house, the number of books in your house, your siblings, the school you attend, your teachers at school, and so on ad infinitum.

Thirdly, as that annoying shithead Sam Harris writes, a number of findings in neuroscience have proved that “Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this ‘decision’ and believe that you are in the process of making it.” This means that the subjective feeling of deliberation has no connection to the actual machinations of deliberation that are going on in your brain (to which you have no access whatsoever). Consciousness of decision-making is therefore irrelevant to the question of free-will.

It is easy to see why these truths make free-will in our intuitive sense seem absurd. Define freedom in any normal way, and you will conclude that we don’t have it.

And yet, somehow, compatibilists still exist. Even more strangely, their arguments (i.e. ways of framing) aren’t totally insane either. They somehow manage to accept all these facts and still argue that we have the freedom required for moral responsibility (the only people who don't have freedom, they say, are the manifestly deranged or impaired). So how do they do it? In order to pull off this great feat of philosophical artistry, they have four main tacks.

The first is Derek Parfit’s strategy in On What Matters: highlighting the subtle distinction between “determinism” and “fatalism”. In the relevant chapter of this book, Parfit argues (as I recall it) that those who claim that determinism contradicts moral responsibility are victims of a common confusion of determinism and fatalism. Fatalism, Parfit says, is the condition of reality for Oedipus Rex in Sophocles’ famous play. If you are fated to experience some calamity, as Oedipus is, it means that whatever decision you make, the universe will find some way of putting you back on the path towards disaster. In Oedipus Rex, no matter what Oedipus chose to do, he was always going to end up having sex with his mother – thereby fulfilling the prophecy. But, as Parfit points out, nobody thinks our universe is fatalistic, just deterministic (or perhaps probabilistic, but if that makes any difference at all, it is on the side of compatibilism). In a deterministic universe, he says, our big, complex brains mean we can genuinely “make decisions”. We genuinely have “choices”, and these choices then affect our future. Even if these choices have antecedent causes in bio-chemical goings on in our neural structure (and these bio-chemical goings on have antecedent causes in the laws of physics), they are choices nonetheless. Our language of “decisions” and “responsibility” etc is therefore not in error.

The second tack is to observe how darn complicated our brains are. In his Big Think interview on Free Will, Steven Pinker (who seems to agree with me that the debate on free-will is a matter of framing) points out that the human brain consists of “a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses”. This means, he says, that choices are not possible to predict “in any simple way”. Pinker also observes that there is a significant neurological difference between reflexes (unconscious responses to stimuli like an iris contracting in strong light), and active decisions (say, deliberating over what to get for dinner or where to move a chess piece). The latter involve vast areas of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, and incorporate a vast array of information. So even if you’re not conscious of all the deliberation that goes into these active decisions (whatever “you” means), the brain has to make far more of an effort – seemingly vindicating the idea that a choice really is being made out of the landscape of possibilities. As a compatibilist would say, Does it matter that this choice goes on under cover of darkness if it’s still the brain in your skull doing it?

The third is to focus on the mentalistic level of analysis rather than the bio-chemical-physical. John Horgan demonstrates this strategy brilliantly in a scathing critique of Sam Harris’ book on free will in an article for Scientific American. His argument is worth quoting directly:

“Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined. Of course all our choices are caused. No free-will proponent I know claims otherwise. The question is how are they caused? Harris seems to think that all causes are ultimately physical, and that to hold otherwise puts you in the company of believers in ghosts, souls, gods and other supernatural nonsense.

But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world.

Some of us have a greater capacity to perceive and act on choices than others. The killer with a brain tumor, the schizophrenic, the sociopath, the obsessive-compulsive do not and cannot make decisions--or change their minds--in the way that I do. When I weigh the pros and cons of writing about Harris, my chain of reasoning is determined by the substance of my thoughts, not their physical instantiation.

Consider: When I watch the video of Sam Harris talking at Caltech, is it the electrons streaming through my MacBook, the photons impinging on my eye, the sound waves entering my ear that make me want to respond to Harris? Of course not. It's the meaning of the video that stirs me, not its physical embodiment. I could have watched a DVD of Harris's talk, or read a transcript, or listened to someone summarize his lecture over the telephone. And it's possible that Harris's words, instead of provoking me to write a critical response, could have changed my mind about free will, so that I decided to write a column defending his point of view. Of course, if I thought about it for a moment, I'd realize that the fact that Harris had changed my mind and hence my actions was evidence of my free will.”

The fourth is simply to draw attention to the fact that determinists are far too demanding. Horgan partly uses this strategy in the argument quoted above when he points out Harris’ obsession with “prior causes”. Determinists like Harris say that “prior causes” are all we need to refute free will. But, if you think about it, this creates a kind of absurdity. It means that anyone who denies the existence of a Cartesian ego – which makes no sense anyway – is led to believe that a human is no freer than a toad or an amoeba. In effect, therefore, if you accept the formula prior cause = no freedom, then free-will isn’t even a question. This seems obviously unacceptable: if free-will is not even a possibility on a given formula, then it’s clearly the wrong formula. Although this objection might seem like a mere bromide, it is actually an important semantic point. After all, it clearly makes sense to say that a human is more free than a chimpanzee, or that a highly intelligent, highly rational person is more free than some paranoid schizophrenic. Indeed, this brings us to one of Dan Dennett's main arguments: Dennett claims that, though we should (gleefully) abandon the intuitive or religious conception of free will, we can legitimately adopt the engineer's concept of "freedom" instead -- the view of freedom as a kind of continuum, varying in terms of degrees of 'movement' and extent of complexity. Crucially, this way of thinking allows us to say basically what we want to say: that a rock has no degrees of freedom, an ant has slightly more, a frog has more than an ant, a cat has more than a frog, a chimp has more than a cat, a mentally ill human has more than a chimp, and a mentally healthy, temperate, rational human has more than a mentally ill human. And once you accept this way of talking as legitimate (and it seems hard to reject), the shoe suddenly flips to the other foot: instead of being on the defensive, compatibilists can now accuse the incompatibilists of a kind of absurdity. How is it reasonable to deny the property of free will to the most intelligent and most complex organism in the known universe? How is it reasonable to deny free will to the animal that is the best candidate for it?

   I’m not really sure that one way of framing the debate is better than the other, although I am sympathetic to both sides. My favourite perspective on free will is that of Noam Chomsky, who frames the problem in a third way – one that commits him to neither side while also not committing him to mysticism.

Before I explain what this brilliant third perspective is, I should point out that I don’t agree with all of Chomsky’s comments about free will. For example, I know that he often makes a quip about free will that I believe to be facile: the classic meme that people who write “learned tomes” denying the existence of free will are refuting their arguments by the very act of writing a book (why would they bother making the effort if they really believed their actions were inevitable?). I know Chomsky makes this quip in jest (that’s why it’s called a “quip”), but even so, I think the quip itself is the result of a common misconception about free-will: namely, the Parfit-identified confusion of “determinism” and “fatalism”. It is not a primitive mistake to think that decisions exist in an important sense (even if you deny that they exist from the eye of the universe). It is undoubtedly true to say that people put effort into certain activities. Our language isn’t totally misleading us.

Now onto Chomsky’s perspective.

To put it briefly, Chomsky is sceptical that we even have the right categories to answer whether we have free-will or not – or perhaps even to phrase the question in the right way. He suggests that the main reason why our intuitions of free-will seem so out of whack with our best science is that we only have two scientific concepts to bring to bear on the problem – randomness and determinacy – and both of them seem utterly inappropriate. As he remarks, an intelligent Martian might be “looking at us and thinking how stupid we are – why do we keep to determinacy and randomness when there’s obviously that thing out there (that I can’t point to ‘cause I’m a human)?”

Even though Chomsky doesn’t suggest this, I can’t help thinking that what we should do to overcome this conundrum is invent some new words ourselves. They probably wouldn’t catch on (since they presumably would have been invented before if the concepts they express were congenial to our way of thinking), but it would be an interesting thing to do nonetheless. In fact, I've even made a start myself:

Perhaps we can say that brains have the property of deterministic spontaneity (only an apparent oxymoron), bio-spontaneity or neuro-spontaneity. Perhaps we can argue that bio-freedom or weak-freedom is an emergent property of neural complexity (as people say about consciousness). Perhaps we can say that humans have, instead of free-will, deterministic freedom (another apparent oxymoron), weak-freedom, bio-freedom or neuro-freedom. Perhaps we don’t even need compound words, but can just invest an entirely new word: we can say that brains have the property of spontaneation or that humans have libertaneity. Perhaps we can use the Old English word for freedom, freodom.

If you accept this new usage, it immediately solves the philosophical problem of free-will. The answer to the question, “Do humans have free-will?” goes from “It depends on how you frame it” to “That’s the wrong language; we have libertaneity” or “That’s the wrong language; we have freodom”. The answer to the question, “How does a physical brain, subject to natural laws, give us this “libertaneity” or “freodom”?” is “The brain is sufficiently complex for the emergence of the property of “spontaneation”.

Isn’t that wonderful?

[This was given a fairly significant edit on 5 July 2016]