Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #178
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Channel: Lex Fridman
Views: 381,952
Rating: 4.879869 out of 5
Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, michael malice and yaron brook, mit ai
Id: Pl3x4GINtBQ
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Length: 265min 18sec (15918 seconds)
Published: Sat Apr 24 2021
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This is only my first exposure to Yaron, but I kept finding myself annoyed about the odd, irrelevant hills he was choosing to "die" on. I was glad that Michael was on to reset the vibe.
It's like no one could say "this word has many different definitions" or "you've taken my analogy well out of it's context".
These guys completely misunderstood Donald Hoffman’s work in my opinion.
I think Yaron is living a pretty privileged life and it showed during this episode.
The free market is exactly that. Free. Free to dominate, coerce, manipulate etc.
I feel the Yaron and Malice dont understand RealPolitik and concepts of hegemony(Thucydides trap). He always glosses over these things and simply says "The market will take care of things".
No Yaron. No it wont.
Great episode. Thank you for hosting it!
Happy about the podcast length. Frictionless bag of positively heated arguments. Great guests. Love you.
Two simpletons convinced that they are having a deep intellectual conversation.
Yaron's view that sober waking reality is 'real' and everything else is just a construction of the brain doesn't make a lot of sense IMO, the fact that you can change your experience demonstrates it's a construct at all times. We don't exist 'in the world' we exist in our consciousness (though saying 'our' is a bit funny)
During the Anarchist Debate part I felt like Michael did not really address Yarron's points and instead return whataboutisms regarding corruption in the current state of American politics and law.
TLDR In order to seriously engage with the outworking of any religion, you have to seriously engage with the foundations of that religion. By supposing that he is a better moral arbiter than the Christian God, Yaron proves he does not fully understand the importance of the very mythological structure he believes he supports. This causes him to fundamentally misunderstand religions more broadly.
'Once you get philosophy that explains the real world, you don't need religion'- Yaron ~54 min
Wrong. Any sufficiently robust philosophy becomes religious in its application. The only way to mass institute a philosophy without religious structures is to keep the adherents completely isolated. Once there are social interactions around a philosophy, religious practices will emerge to both support and signal the support of that philosophy.
If objectivism was widely adopted as it's own primary descriptor (e.g. objectivist atheists vs atheist objectivists), there would be regular objectivist meetings and symbolic representations of objectivist adherence. There would be objectivist saints, and possibly even objectivist god worship after a long enough period. There would be objectivist miracles ('My life was in shambles before I became an objectivist, now it's miraculously better'), there would be objectivist scriptures (Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged there for the taking), there would be objectivist sects as well as sectarian conflict.
Religion is impossible to eradicate on a societal level in the exact same way that morality is impossible to eradicate on an individual level. Religions are social morals; they are highly ritualized, objectively foundationless, and generate spontaneously within the society/individual pair. The entire point of religion is to explain and give strength to beliefs that are necessarily irrational ('it's worth being a good person even if it causes me to suffer immensely', 'life is worth living even when death appears much better'). As long as irrational beliefs are necessary to maintain a functioning society/individualistic ideal, religion will be necessary. It isn't so much that Kant revived religion, it's that religion is always reborn, and it has infinitely many mechanisms through which it regenerates. Kant's philosophical defense is an example of one such mechanism, the French Cult of Reason is another, but the supreme example is the mythological resurrection of Christ himself.
Yaron's critique of 'Christian sacrifice' is misguided for these same reasons. While admitting that monotheism is a beneficial evolution away from polytheism, he ignores the meaning of biblical narratives by ignoring their history, as in his take on the sacrifice of Isaac:
Nearly every culture Abraham was familiar with was very much pro-human sacrifice. No other major religion of the time actively scorned the practice, and the story itself is an object lesson regarding the nature of God's character. It would have been extremely novel (and a moral advancement) that the Jewish God did not rely on human blood to grant atonement. Even if Yaron asserts that animal sacrifice is also wrong, that belief is also a result of the fulfillment of the purpose of sacrifice through Christ's resurrection. By arguing human sacrifice is immoral, Yaron is explicitly arguing that the Christian moral program was effective.
Jordan Peterson's discussions of Christianity all boil down to the idea that the Christian bible is a supreme work of mythology because it incapsulates every possible moral position. You can use the bible to advocate for genocide and war, just as easily as you can love and peace. It is not so much a book as it is a 'library of books', and any moral lesson you can imagine is contained in at least one section. That is in part why the Abrahamic religions are so virulent- they can form the basis for any conceivable religious practice, and therefore are useful to anyone seeking to institute mass cultural change.
Yaron shows his own bias by choosing one narrow interpretation of the story the sacrifice of Isaac, and completely ignoring every other popular defense of Abraham's actions. It is ironic that even as he says he would oppose God's command towards human sacrifice, he is agreeing with God that human sacrifice is bad/unnecessary. If you take the sacrificial narrative seriously, there are many moral defenses of Abraham's attempt to kill Isaac.
Isaac himself was a child that had been miraculously conceived in a woman who had already undergone menopause. Some teach that when Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham believed God was going to perform another miracle and bring back Isaac from the dead. Or maybe Abraham believed God required true sacrifice, and believed God was going to provide him another child, just as miraculously. Either way, God did not actually require the death of Isaac, and there are an infinite number of interpretations available that show the story in a morally positive light within the context of a time. Yaron focuses in on the interpretation that both ignores the rich content of the text, and implies that Yaron himself possess a higher moral understanding than God, the literal creator of morality. In assuming that he is morally superior to the God of the bible, he ignores the foundational claim of monotheistic teachings (that God is the ultimate origin of morality) and therefore invalidates the rest of his argument.