Sam Harris and Steven Pinker Live on Stage in Converstation

okay well so Steve and I will speak for about 45 minutes to an hour and he will continue with his uplifting thesis and I will try to terrify and depressor only partly joking so Steve I want to reiterate what you said at the end there about what your what you're not saying you're not saying that there's some magical force that's pulling us toward a better future there's nothing built into the system that guarantees this can't run off the rails spectacularly right and this is something you're often charged with me that it's just there's some kind of teleology or something pushing from behind that is just also the good yeah and no matter how many times I explicitly say that is not what any of this means as I said intellectual culture can't wrap its mind around the concept of progress they constantly regress to the idea of some mystical force some arc of justice that carries us ever upward whereas the idea is not really all that exotic anyway we try to understand the world we value human well-being we think up ways to improve human well-being and we sometimes succeed and if we remember what works if we abandon what didn't work there can be cumulative improvements nothing mystical about that yeah yeah so let's start with the concept that you lay out very clearly in your book which is the notion of entropy the second law of thermodynamics tell us what that is because it says has many implications for your thesis yes one thing I did not mention in this particular talk in the interest of time or some of the insights that science provides about the human condition the idea that science is just a source of useful gadgets but that we have to look to to religion to mysticism for our fundamental understanding of who we are I think is wrong I think there are some major discoveries of science that are highly relevant to understanding our predicament one of them being entropy the fact in a closed system without input of energy things fall apart disorder increases stuff happens and that's just because there are vastly more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right right and what implication is that a lot of advances in human wellbeing that is local bits of order that suit our needs that make us healthy and happy and comfortable require inputs of energy that are left to their own devices things will collapse and another is that we should recalibrate what we think of as our as the baseline of human existence I think it's we're so used to the fruits of human progress that it's easy to think that the natural state of affairs is universal prosperity and harmony and equality and any deviation from it is a raging injustice for which we have to identify a villain understanding of entropy and evolution that being another discovery of science with major implications for the human condition suggests that no left to our own devices we kind of live in squalor and chaos and disorder and misery that we should be appreciative of the human accomplishments that have lifted us out of that state we should of course still recognize the problems that occur but we shouldn't assume that things go well all by themselves in the universe doesn't work that way so you say in the book that the poverty doesn't need an explanation wealth does all right so a pond that's ever yeah that's a quote from the cantos Peter Bower and it's a it isn't an implication of the fact that entropy and evolution define our baseline everything that we rely on for food is itself an evolved organism that doesn't want to be eaten would rather keep its flesh to itself so even the struggle to feed ourselves is an uphill battle but yeah a major insight of the Enlightenment is that we need to explain how wealth comes into existence atoms and his predecessors being the major theorists so you mentioned negativity bias briefly in the talk and why wouldn't negativity bias just be a wise acknowledgement of entropy because there are more ways to break things and to fix them it's harder to fix them once they're broken than to break them as you said there's there's so many ways to for things to go wrong and very few ways for them to go right so why isn't it a built-in pessimism just a clearer scene of that yeah well it is and I think the most plausible explanation for the negativity bias is that there are more ways for things to go wrong and moreover they're the things that can go wrong can do you much more harm than anything that goes right can help us I mean as I said quote my wait stanford colleague amos tversky said imagine today how many things could happen for the rest of the day that could make you much better off I think I might need an old friend you know win the lottery and then you start to run out pretty quickly now imagine all the things that could happen that could make you what much worse off I mean the list is endless and the and the harm is the degree of harm is bottomless including death of course so I think it is adaptive to have that as individuals living in a natural environment but since the Enlightenment we have as a species enjoyed this highly unnatural state of progress and we're not wired to appreciate it where were wired for a world in which there was little to no progress and the role of journalism here is pretty crucial because you you make the point in the book that there's this classic idea about journalism that if it bleeds it leads and so we're and there's always going to be enough bad news to fill any broadcast to fill in a newspaper but you make another point which I had never thought of before which is relates to the the non-monetary s'ti of these trends these are these trends in progress of perhaps define that concept for us because it's useful yeah well on journalism I certainly don't want to join in the course of denunciation of the mainstream media because they are much better than some of the alternatives there is a tension between Breitbart in the New York Times that we there's a under fight for a critical distinction absolutely but even many journalists are starting to realize that there that the ethic that has dominated journalism especially since the 1970s that serious journalism means bad news as one editor put it journalism is bad news of journalism good news is advertising but there are and there of course there are benefits to exposing the the problems in government and in the environment and in the rest of the world but I think journalists have begun to realize that there there can be a kind of a corrosive aspect to that as well that if the only thing gets reported is the the fails the crises the catastrophes the corruption then it can lead people cynical about their institutions and open the door to to the demagogues who say only I can fix it and when Donald Trump in particular who ran on a relentless campaign of negativity that you can't walk down the street without getting shot and there there are no jobs in the cities and no one's learning anything in school the left did not really have a narrative to oppose him and so it left the field opened and the people who agree then society is just spiraling downhill well why not vote for a radical nothing could be worse than what we have now is the impression that the news conveys now if it's the reality is that in fact there are massive improvements they don't get they don't attract headlines day to day but if they're never reported then there is no reason for anyone to have any confidence in institutions like democracy like international organizations and a since things have gone right they must have gone right somewhere at some time and those should be reported to so a movement within journalism sometimes called constructive journalism or solutions journalism such as in the New York Times a feature by David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg has tried to to shift that balance yeah on the issue of the trend lines and so you all those lines you show are going in the right direction virtually all of them but they're jagged and there's this the concept of monotonicity the fact that it's not only going down in every moment so that you could actually report note perhaps not even consciously fall into this pattern but just do it you could report the uptick of bad news yes and only and honestly say well you know crime is 10 percent higher than it was last year and do that again five years from now and never acknowledged the progress yeah I wouldn't know you were actually misleading as to the general trend yes exactly there are I do call attention to to kind of gimmicks of journalism that add to the overall impression of decline one of them is if you have a a trend that's going down with the occasional uptick then what happens is the year by year decline since it's the same as if there's a decline last year in the year before in the year before then that's no longer news but when there's an uptick that's news if there were over a span of 50 years two years in which things got worse the forty eight years in which things got better and the two years in which things got worse our news that they get reported and the the other years in which things got better is never reported then you have an impression this exact opposite to reality so that's one gimmick there's another gimmick that colonists sometimes use which is if you scan the news of the world for all of the things that are going wrong everywhere on Earth every epidemic every terrorist attack and you put them together in a list it'll always look really scary it'll really look like where the world is falling apart and I think you can always do that because the world is never going to be perfect so now how has the concept of the Enlightenment become a dirty word because and all these associated terms that account for the progress are also tainted so democracy capitalism globalization cosmopolitanism is a where they use a lot that that it carries absolutely no weight with with most people how have these been stigmatized concepts yeah in among intellectuals the Enlightenment is is kind of a mixed bag there are some who as I do praised it credited with our progress but there it there are others seem think that it's just for was the harbinger of colonialism and slavery and genocide and I treat this in the book I that I think this is completely anachronistic slavery has existed in every society every since the dawn of civilization imperialism has by definition characterized every Empire like the Assyrian Empire the Babylonian pyre the Roman Empire we call them empires because they were imperialist they expanded their territory they enslave people they white people out in during their conquests colonialism well they were probably the most famous outcome of the Enlightenment was the United States of America and its whole point was to push back against colonialism that was the yet that's why why there was a revolution why there's a Revolutionary War the there's a habit I've among some intellectuals to blame everything that happened since 1800 on the Enlightenment whereas a lot of the things that happened after 1800 were actually results of the counter enlightenment the backlash against the ideals of the Enlightenment extolling the nation the culture the tribe thought the land the lineage blood and soil was the the model for this movement fascism which grew out of it romantic militarism all of these which were promoted by people who were made no bones about the fact that they detested the Enlightenment that's what they were reacting against and there are some intellectuals though who confuse all of these nineteenth-century movements and say well since world war one happened after the Enlightenment it was the fault of enlightenment whereas the intellectual history the paper trail shows the exact opposite yes I want to talk about politics for a few minutes and and how unhelpful it is in this area but first let's just tie down your politics what what are your what political biases do you do you take to this project yeah I mean I'm a moderate centrist not because I believe that the truth always lies between two extremes or Goldilocks principle but out of a first of all of an acknowledgment that there has been progress so something must have gone right in the institutions that we have an acknowledgement there can be alternatives that are much worse such as Venezuela such as Russia such as Turkey such as most of the much of the Islamic world in terms of measures of human flourishing and that the the recognition which goes back I guess to Edmund Burke that if the institutions of society are functioning halfway decently the streets aren't running with blood if obesity is a bigger problem and starvation if more people are clamoring to get out and running for the exits then something must be going right misil alternatives and that we should build build on that there's just so many more ways for things to go wrong so you're a leader at the all right yes this is a yes one of the more bizarre things that I've been called but yes yeah and the book is almost a in fact it is in the chapter on humanism I lay out wiping all trite assault wrong all wrong yeah yeah if you haven't seen that someone edited together a part of a panel discussion that that Steve was was involved in and made him seem like he was boosting for the all right and that got a lot of traction for about a day and a half so the attacks on so so I guess to take politics for another moment how is how is the the criticism of the Enlightenment or the day of the allergy to the Enlightenment different on the left and the right do they have a different character just come from both sides it does come from both sides from the right there's the forces of nationalism and tribalism that we should what we should advance is the glory of the nation the natural destiny of greatness of Russia or the United States and and with the resignation of the fact that all nations should rightfully pursue greatness even at each other's expense that there should be a zero-sum competition and that it's only right that Russia try to be as great as it can while the United States tries to be as great as it can this is a almost a definition of Donald Trump's view of international relations as opposed to the idea that there are vast possibilities for positive-sum cooperation such as nonpoint of war to begin with that are fostered by international norms and organization so that's that's one obviously the idea that the source of our values should come from religion and scripture also typically associated with the right although not exclusively would be another counter enlightenment theme looking back to a golden age as opposed to efforts toward increasing progress that namely reactionary ideology would be another right-wing counter Enlightenment view on the Left certainly Marxism was a I would identify as a counter enlightenment ideology that saw history as a struggle a zero-sum struggle between classes and so it had its own notion of progress but that notion consisted ultimately of the vanquishing of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat so it saw progress as defined by conflict rather than problem-solving identity politics which is more associated with the left and the right is another form of tribalism that sees society as just a struggle for power also zero-sum among different sex and sexual orientations and races and that also has that contempt for science that believes that science is not the pursuit of truth but just another mythology just Ana justification of power that has little put a little stock in reason that reason too is just a pretext for the powerful to consolidate their power and that we shouldn't evaluate hypotheses for whether they're true or not but but look and whose interests they serve so that's some of the left-wing opposition to a lack of in fact both sides seem to use this word scientism I'm wondering if yeah anyone has ever said anything worth hearing after that word well put yes it's a Buddhist words that it's kind of a boo word you say it and everyone's supposed to go boo kind of like neoliberalism is another one that's almost meaningless for the same reason so let's talk for a moment about the primacy of reason now why is reason so good well how is reason something that either must be defended by everybody even if they don't even if they're not aware of it or actually needs no defense well by the very act of asking the question you've kind of answered it you've asked me for reasons the fact that we're seeking to answer that question in fact any question by stating propositions questioning them evaluating them as opposed to say by who can mount the bigger Posse who can shout the loudest who can bar the door to who else bribery beauty contests the fact that we have observed those ways of deciding which to embrace but instead are asking questions and seeking answers means that we're already committed to reason and how does this relate to concepts like the unity of knowledge so the the unity of knowledge another important enlightenment idea I would say that there's not a divide between the social sciences arts humanities sciences that there's a continuous landscape of knowledge there's there are logical differences among propositions a mathematical or analytic or logical proposition is not the same as an empirical one both of those are distinct from normative statements but that they all bear on each other and that the divisions within university for example in different faculties is just for the convenience of Dean's not a fundamental epistemological divide between different kinds of subject matter yeah yeah you and I have both been influenced by David Deutsch you talk about him a bunch in the book and he has this yeah David is really remarkable he's been on the podcast I think twice and he has this incredibly inspiring vision of just how powerful knowledge is and it's it's it can sound tautological or otherwise circular when you state it but I don't think it is this idea that whatever is compatible the laws of physics can be achieved with the requisite knowledge and so it's just picture how hopeful this this vision is he imagines being able to just move into the vacuum of space the relative vacuum of space and sweep up stray hydrogen atoms and use it and fuse those atoms into heavier elements and then use those heavier elements to construct the smallest possible machine that can build itself and any other possible machine and then use those machines to build fantastically complicated information processing creatures such as we are and beyond and the only thing that is lacking at every step is the requisite knowledge and that's a it's just that this almost religious conception of how powerful knowledge is well I use it as one of the two epigraphs of the book yeah fact yeah yeah Spinoza so Abbi do you do you fully subscribe to that vision of just basically that we're always standing at the beginning of infinity in terms of the possibility of what knowledge can do yes I mean what he of course leaves out is is cost and in complexity some some things some problems are exponentially hard more you apply them more complex they get to report where they quit overwhelm any finite intelligence that's applying knowledge but nonetheless I think the the insight you know as you say it's almost tautological because you could say that the definition of compatible with the laws of nature is that we can accomplish it with the right knowledge right but at the same time it is I agree with you I'm kind of inspiring in the sense that we can't achieve everything because of cost because of combinatorial explosions exponential complexity but we can achieve a lot more than that we might think if we didn't acknowledge that that truth and of course every variable that affects human flourishing is amenable to this kind of analysis and there's a there's a moral argument that runs through your book which is that we should care about human flourishing that this is the norm that should matter to us and then not just human flourishing but the flourishing of anything that can flourish so if we if it's right to if animals can suffer or experience well-being we should care about those as well this even is a controversial statement so why is it that you both of us have been in this position before but to have to defend that the flourishing of conscious creatures is the the baseline standard of morality is it surreal to you to have to defend that or it it is kind of surreal because the thing that we might have been afraid of is that this would be considered so trite and banal and obvious and I'm controversial as not to be worth saying but in fact it's regionally controversial and there are alternatives the most obvious ones are from religion namely that what is valuable is the fate of your soul in an afterlife as opposed to your years on earth the degree to which you and other people conform to particular Commandments as opposed to what we would identify as flourishing states of flourishing like happiness knowledge richness of experience there's also a notion that the the experience of the teeming masses is is irrelevant that what really what all accounts are the feats of artistic or intellectual or military greatness of the heroes the elites the supermen and that it is bourgeois sentimentality to think about the happiness of everyday people this is a philosophy associated with Nietzsche yeah and with a lot surprising number of of artists and intellectuals some sympathetic to to Nietzsche who often have a contempt for the masses because they live such soulless conformist consumerist decadent lies that's off their lies are almost not worth living if they don't achieve something great and there's a fascinating book by John Kerry called the intellectuals and the masses read documents that a lot of early 20th century literary intellectuals had a kind of contempt for the masses that that literally bordered on board on the genocidal they often had genocide all fantasies that the world would be better if you didn't have the the the masses of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie living their their pathetic meaningless existence and that runs against the idea that all humans have a have a right and to flourish and we have an obligate to help them yeah there's there's this idea that somehow progress might not be enough and this is this is something that's come up I've read many of your negative reviews Andrew Sullivan being one I recommend you you take valium before you read Andrews review Cynthia's book but it is this idea that that somehow progress as you said is antiseptic or or doesn't capture the totality of what we might care about and this is expressed if it's another example here is the rise of jordan peterson which which many people have remarked upon it seems like he has unmasked in the secular community a kind of hunger for a quasi religious orientation toward mythology and meaning and there's there's a sense that that progress again even just grabbing all the variables you you witness so the health and wealth and and free time and everything else peace that it carries with it its own shadow side that somehow the the more everything gets better the worse it's actually getting and and Jordan is a he just disparage Nietzsche and you go after him hard in your book as a kind of psychopath and I I actually agree I think if Nietzsche were alive today and had access to a gun he would probably then be our next school shooter although his suicide note would be brilliant so the masterpiece but there's this sense that that we are the better things get we are getting drawn into some sort of almost attractor state of meaninglessness and malaise and and terrible darkness awaiting us there how do you deal with this concern so I have so I mean I like Andrew Sullivan I know him but his review was bizarre not least because he was based on actually not on reading the book but coming to a talk and then he talks about all the things that I left out of the book but didn't read the book he says including the question of happiness and quality of life each of which got a separate chapter because they're not necessarily the same thing this is actually a recurring theme I noticed that many of your detractors dance on Your Grave trumpeting points that you actually anticipate an answer in the book and explain the book is so long I tried to I knew what the objections with me and I tried to answer them but just to take these these examples means among the bizarre things that that Andrew had in his review were the the claim that with all of this progress how come we have all gotten so miserable why is there our increases in suicide and depression and anxiety and actually have a chapter in I fact checked these claims and in fact they're not true the vast majority of countries have gotten happier the vast majority of people say that they are happy so the claim that that we're all familiar with the massive lot of men lead lives of quiet desperation from Henry David Thoreau how a reckless living in a cabin on a pond if we know this was never made clear but but the massive men disagree so in these happiness surveys most people actually majority people call themselves pretty happy or happier and there is a widespread fallacy is actually in a systematic illusion that people underestimate the happiness of other people yes people how happy are you you know scale one to ten or seven or eight how happy do you think your neighbors are oh you know for three huge gap and it's the optimism gap yeah they are an optimist again and for happiness it's a chasm there's also a a again going back to the some of the both religious and romantic heroic opposition to the Enlightenment the idea that somehow if you live a life that you you you're living you bring up kids you enjoy what life has to offer somehow that's meaningless or solace or decadent and I try to address that by saying okay what do you what could we all agree our ingredients of a good life above and beyond just you know being happy you can say maybe being happy you know having a smile on your face that just superficial but let's say you consider access to the great works of humankind that is being able to see great art the great novels listen to great music see great films these are massively expanded I mean all of us have a little device in our shirt pocket where we can get access to any of the great films all of the great recorded music something that even when we were younger would have been just luxuries for the few if you wanted to see you know when I was a student gonna see Rashomon you had to wait years and in the hopes that it would show up at a Repertory Theater who are on late-night television probably would be disappointed now you know I could like watch Rashomon right now that's got to be it that's an example of how some of the higher callings in life such as appreciating great art and culture faster now generation or ability to enjoy to see the wonders of the world one graft I didn't show is that the cost of air travel has plunged and the number of air trips that people take of have risen a variety of cultural experience simply the number of kinds of food that we can enjoy has vastly increased just about any neighborhood any town in the country you can go out for you know Thai food or Mexican food a Vietnamese food few decades ago it would be you know pork and potatoes so you name all what makes life worth living and they've all increased now of course that doesn't count life in a existence in an afterlife but I think you could argue that that belief in an afterlife as the source of meaning and purpose is highly pernicious because if devalues life on Earth it says that death is a mirror [Applause] yeah that death is a mere rite of passage you know kind of like a midlife crisis or a Bar Mitzvah you just don't going on to a longer period and so who cares about this 70 or 80 years you have on earth so so I'd say the idea that life is meaningful because of what happens after we die it's actually rather dangerous I think it might be indistinguishable from some Bar Mitzvahs I've actually been to so let's just see if we can find a kernel of truth in this in this worry because there's it strikes me that there could be a kind of uncanny valley of well-being because there's so much of our sense of our own well-being as comparative right so you have in a very prosperous society like our own increased wealth and equality and when you're comparing yourselves to others if many people feel their diminished because they're just following so many extraordinarily lucky people on Instagram and I mean actually if you've never seen Steve's nature photography Steve is an amazing nature photographer you can see his photos on his website I've actually had this experience with you I'm sorry I've looked at some of your photos and I'm you know I'm thinking why am i podcasting in my basement while Steve is out there photographing flamingos so you're actually part of this problem hahaha so is it conceivable to you that everything can be getting better and better and yet a significant proportion of people even the luckiest people are feeling worse and worse yeah there is there is that suspicion of that FOMO fear of missing out as one of the hazards of social media and social media leading to a whole generation of miserable teenagers that was especially popularized by a story of the Atlantic by Gene 20 research do I have a lot of respect for but but I think that the big picture is that that's all exaggerated that the declined that that 20 called attention to in the Atlantic article it's a really tiny little decrease in happiness when it's measured over the full scale and by logic the studies of effects of social media show that for a lot of people that it increases sense of well-being and happiness the main source of unhappiness from social media according to a huge Harris survey comes when we learn about the misfortunes of people that we like that we feel we feel their pain and that is the major source of unhappiness from social media so I mean it's it's also such a recent development of social media it tends to get blamed for just about every social problem political personal emotional cultural and while not denying that there certainly have been problems especially political we it has been around for so little time that we haven't really developed norms and countermeasures to allow us to enjoy the advantages without some of the disadvantages and I think there's reason to believe that as with other technologies like telephones which in their time were blamed for disrupting family life and interrupting meals and having people be slaves to the yet the receiver that we developed workarounds and life turned out to be okay it strikes me there's a related concern here where you talk about this in the book so you take something like terrorism which people fear and we marshal massive resources to prevent and you I think you compared it favorably to what bees and wasps do to us every year more people die from bee stings and wasps and stings and terrorism in the US but it seems to me that that so you just imagine a terrorist attack you know an order of magnitude larger than September 11 so you know 30,000 people die in a city based on something given that our overreaction to that what you will which in by purely by virtue of a rational response to body count what must be deemed an overreaction is guaranteed right given that we're just we can't we can't treat it like a hurricane or we can't treat it like an outbreak of flu we can't treat it like the the highway deaths that are going to happen every year until we get autonomous cars and then that's the same scale at 30,000 people a year now don't we have to price in that overreaction if if it's just if we're guaranteed to fight multiple wars and spend trillions of dollars and suffer massive economic dislocation even with an event that at that scale right isn't isn't that the measure of how bad terrorism in fact is yes although it's overpricing the terror that leads to some of the very pernicious effects that you mentioned such as treating it as such an existential threat that we have to say go to invade Iraq and the worst effects from terrorism are exactly from come from overpricing it namely the extreme reactions especially when it comes to invading other countries so I do think it's fair that that because there's a psychological cost to deaths from terrorism that there isn't from equivalent causes of death like drowning in bathtubs and dying from from being wasp stings that we could take measures that are commensurate with that extra fear and I mentioned it in the in the in the book that that time there certainly is a special psychological category of fear of someone trying to kill you presumably because whereas the accidents even if they kill us in much greater numbers than terrorists but they don't consists of some intelligent agent that's trying to kill you whereas terrorism does that's what capitalizes on men we I mean it's called terrorism because it generates terror and we have greater terror of an intelligent agent that is overcoming obstacles to do us in man and the fickle finger of fate so I think that could be factored in but it's been factored in way too much in fact in the invasion of Iraq being the prime example but also the fact that for many voters in for example in 2016 election terrorism was their top concern and they something that again Donald Trump capitalized on that that that the country was not safe that it was immigrants that were responsible for it and the fact that it was exaggerated because we we do have this fear I think actually multiplied the the negative effects of terrorism yeah and if bees and wasps were smart and having meetings about how much they wanted to kill us that would be scary yeah yes so actually well I should revisit this issue of the the alt-right because you the the the panel discussion you were you were on that got cut up and they used to defame you was actually very interesting you have an argument about how political correctness is enabling this rise of kind of all right populism let's let's run through that a bit why is political correctness dangerous for us yeah by the by the alt-right I was not referring to tiki torch carrying skinheads which is sometimes the term outright applied to but the original sense of internet-savvy often tech-savvy generally young men who found each other on the Internet later on on that social media many of them highly intelligent highly analytic but felt that they were they were ostracized they were kept from certain truths by the taboos and conventions of mainstream intellectual life particularly in universities and when they stumbled across scientific or statistical facts that were undiscussables in the universities felt this enormous sense of empowerment that they discovered a truth that mainstream couldn't handle and made them feel that they could reject all of the mainstream body of understanding and knowledge that sometimes called they call it taking the red pill an illusion from from the matrix seeing reality and because they then were able to share these facts in their own discussion groups without any kind of pushback or debate or refutation from the rest of intellectual life they can develop into pretty toxic forms and if you look at say the speeches of my lowly innopolis there I mean what he proposes is taking some statistical generalization and then spinning it into completely outrageous conclusions perhaps deliberately to inflame and to goad so for example the fact that there are differences in life priorities on average between men and women that and this is their enormous amounts of data that I show that this is true if you ask people to rate how important is family how important is career how important is recreation how important is social activism the distributions you get from men and women are not identical I mean I don't shock to anyone but all of the question is your guidance counselor gave you in high school you add them up there are millions of data points they show that men and women are not exactly the same my way mouths words well a hundred female Lumberjacks in the room tonight a lot of pushback so this is the fact it doesn't mean now of course and this is an argument I made the flit in the blank slate there's nothing particularly dangerous about this fact it doesn't need license discrimination because the distributions overlap we should treat people as individuals not as members of a gender and so fairness does not require sameness they must be distinguished but because the the fact could be discussed then the political implements moral implications could be put into context whereas in a community that just feels a revelation that they could talk about this fact amongst themselves then you get you know Milo saying well we should not it not a bit women to a grad school because they're more likely to drop out when they have children or to med school which is a completely preposterous pernicious conclusion but one that wasn't laughed out of court because he was able to say it in this closed forum of people who heard it for the first time and there are other other facts like that which can be domesticated in the crucible of open debate and criticism and refutation but if they are taboo then that I think that creates a space where people who stumble upon them can draw the worst possible conclusions without opposition from the greater intellectual community so that was the dynamic which I think has led to the alt-right in the original in the in its original sense and the one of my co-panelists Wendy kaminer civil liberties lawyer cited a bunch of data that suggested that many of the voters of Trump really were not unemployed coal miners or steel workers they were infuriated by what they perceived as political correctness i buy the hypersensitivity the inability to express certain opinions and that that was a statistically a significant factor in the 2000 the election how concerned are you by the fake news phenomenon both both II the real fake news phenomenon and the fact this phrase fake news has been weaponized against real news yeah how concerned yeah I mean I do think those are dangerous developments but it was just two days ago there was some MIT research that suggested that lies spread faster on social media than truths did you see this it's it seems like there yeah there are features of II III I don't know that it was explained it was just kind of the not lies tend to be more novel the thing you would lie about would be a stronger claim that is stickier but there are I mean I think it we should study it we should try to think of countermeasures but the although there are studies that show that fake news is mainly believed by people who are committed to an ideology who are just seeking more affirmation and and in fact I do discuss in the chapter on reason the fact that our critical faculties are most crippled when it comes to beliefs that affirm the the goodness or right or righteousness of our tribe sometimes called blue lies where a white lie is something that you tell to for the benefit of the addressee and a blue lie is something that you tell for the benefit of the coalition of your tribe and it's possible I don't know what the latest studies demonstrate but that somewhat at least one studies showed that the people who circulate the fakeness the preposterous conspiracy theories are already committed them it's not as if their mind was changed by them but they avidly circulate them to whip up do you at the team right well let's take a few minutes to talk about existential risk which is something that you you poo-poo to some degree in the book it's not that you don't think there are existential risks but you know yeah I know you think there are but like so some of the sexier ones are ones you you think of or overindulge yeah like AI and and this as you know we all have our hobby horses and and being concerned about AI has become one of mine so let's just see if we can I just want to see where you get off the train here and I should say that that both my mother and my mother-in-law are watching now so this is not the time to prove me wrong in public an ancient debate technique that always works so let's start with the concept of existential risk so you what do you think is a legitimate concern with respect to existential risk I don't I don't know whether climate change is literally an existential risk but it is a risk that could cause such immense human suffering that we should take it seriously whether it will kill off the last member of Homo sapiens is not my main concern Road Warriors good enough right well I would be good enough certainly nuclear war which again there are whether or not it's an existential risk it is a certainly a catastrophic risk right only under a nuclear winter scenario itself controversial and which would acquire requires not just you know one or two nuclear bombs going off but hundreds but IIIi would treat them in the category catastrophic risks whether or not they're existential yeah so you're you're not a prepper no you're not you're not getting ready for this you know you don't have guns stockpiled and hey I don't have a bunker I don't have that that's right but I do think that that the threat of nuclear war has been almost criminally downplayed in as an election issue and that it is a fault of political parties the press citizens to not make it a more central issue given the the extreme costs that it could have yeah that's been one of the more alarming things to witness in the last few years that the people who are on the inside of the conversations that that worried about nuclear war are as seem to be as alarmed and someone like William Perry seems to be as as well as alarmed as at any point in our history of the Cold War and yet on the outside this issue has more or less gone away apart from the noises that North Korea has made have laid yeah so just in the in the 2016 election where nuclear or really should have been a an obsession of the debates of the evaluation of the candidate it's simply because one of the flaws of our system of control of nuclear weapons is that the president has far more discretion than that anyone could justify and we've got a mandatory ously impulsive and vindictive now it may be that it may be that there's a happy ending may be that the biggest threat in a generation namely the possibility of nuclear war with North Korea will be diffused I'm not not celebrating yet but this should have been a much bigger issue than for example you know the email server yeah okay so so we haven't so tell me where you get off this train toward my concern about AI so we have this this phenomenon of intelligence right born of information processing in a complex system like a brain and presumably you think there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat right so you think that intelligence clearly can be substrate independent right so we will we will build we've already built intelligent machines they're very narrowly intelligent but they're getting better and better and and they're actually even superhuman within their narrow application so that you know the calculator in your phone is superhuman with respect to or rithmetic it's never going to get worse than that unless we consciously make it worse so I think we both agree for instance that human-level AI is a mirage because the moment we get anything that's at all human-like in its generality if we cobble together that the top hundred cognitive functions that we like and make something that passes the Turing test in some robust way it will be super humid it'll be super super human as a calculator it'll have a superhuman memory it'll be superhuman in playing chess or NGO or anything else that has already exceeded human capacity so slow Lillis take me to the point where we develop a system however unannounced to a human brain and a human mind it might be it could it could be this piecemeal effort of cobbling together the top hundred operations right facial recognition the natural language processing we get something that is superhuman with respect to all of those functions do you doubt first you doubt that that's possible do you think that or do you think that's well that will inevitably happen if we continue to make progress in hardware and software design well it's they could happen if if we wanted to duplicate all those things some of them we may not just not economically worth it in terms of paying off the research effort because we do have humans but even the scenario that you just described is not an existential risk I mean it's yeah but I just want to see where our in time start to divide okay so you imagine something that it works by the way I don't think would particularly were anywhere close to that and there I think that's the complete consensus the most artificial intelligence researchers so it's not as if that's gonna happen in the next five or ten years yeah well it's interesting that there are the people who are who seem most likely to push the ball into the end zone and the people who are sort of on the fringe but still you count themselves among the computer scientists and and robot Isis and AI people who who should know what's going on and you see you tend to hear different noises coming from you the kinds of people who work at deep mind for instance that which is sort of everyone's most likely candidate to push this into the end zone but for me the time frame is kind of it is a non sequitur in the sense that the the time frame is only consoling if Millett let's just say we stipulated we know this isn't going to happen for 20 years or 50 years right it's just it's not it can't happen that should only be consoling if we knew that 20 years or 50 years was enough time for us to figure out how to do it safely right it's like there's a built-in assumption there that that that is enough time to work it out but if it takes 75 years to figure out how to do it safely and it's coming in 50 years well then it's going to get very interesting 50 years from now the other issue for me with respect to time is that we know we're really bad or certainly there are historical examples that show that we can be really bad at forecasting when these breakthroughs will happen so I think one of the Wright brothers when asked how long heavier-than-air flight would would take I think he said 50 years from now when they were about two years from actually doing it well that goes both ways there are many innovations that are just around the corner that we still don't have no though but I mean the most startling example of this is the fact that that Stuart Russell the computer scientists often references that Lord Rutherford perhaps the most knowledgeable nuclear physicist at that moment in in in history said that initiating a nuclear chain reaction to get energy was just moonshine that's his there's a quote and literally 24 hours later Leo Szilard delivered the goods and you know within a few short years we had designs for weapons and and all the rest so we know that even the people closest to making the breakthroughs can often be bad at predicting but for me that the time issue is just is actually a non-issue because if we if we don't know how long it will take to do it safely and we're still we know that the incentives are wrong we know we're in a kind of arms race condition where where people are racing to get as much intelligence as they can get and eight this comes actually comes back to entropy there are more ways to do this dangerously than to do this safely presumably right there more there are more ways to build AI that's not perfectly aligned with our interests than it is to build AI that is perfectly aligned so what about this scenario of all these different operations Google and Facebook and China and who knows who else is in this race condition just forging ahead without a a global understanding of how we will we will finally push into the end zone safely this is it's the final yard whenever that comes that seems dangerous to people again this is not a matter of imagining spontaneous malevolence it's not like we're going to have armies of Terminator robots attacking us it's just the prospect of building something that is more intelligent than we are that can form its own goals by virtue of its being intelligent yeah okay I mean that that was a huge step that what you did what you say but but look what we sow but haven't we've done just that so we we were designed by evolution based on goals that that quite simple as you know is just to spawn and and get our genes into the next generation and hang around long enough so that our progeny can do likewise evolution can't see 99.9% of what we're doing right it can't see conversations like this it didn't anticipate that we would care about any of the things we care about certainly didn't anticipate contraception and chastity and and celibacy and all the other things that people do that are historically against the logic of the utility function that that evolution gave us so couldn't you see that we could design machines that we would put in there their goals and their utility function but they could escape us in the way that we have escaped the dictates of evolution we could actually be blind to the mental lives that they develop well just to be clear what the scenarios are the and and I've looked in some detail at the soaps so-called existential threat or artificial intelligence they be things like we would give an advance an artificial general intelligence the goal of curing cancer and it would turn us all into involuntary guinea pigs for fatal experiments or we would give it the goal of making paper clips and it would turn all available matter into paper clips including our bodies well that was in defensive Nick Bostrom that is just a cartoon meant to illustrate this point that that artificial intelligence could be all4ofus there's two points one is that it's not gonna have common sense unless unless we put the common sense into it or it spontaneously develops the common sense that we would recognize but two there's there really is the prospect of intelligence being radically foreign to us that we could design something that that could you know in the extreme case improve itself in a way that make changes to itself in a way that would develop a a goal structure that it's just highly unintuitive to us and again you possibly misaligned with our well-being yeah I think that is a usually to make those scenarios plausible there has to be some exponential take off some a fool as they call it based on the comic book sound sound of and that I think their number of problems with all with these scenarios I mean one of them is that a lot of them not all but assume project human motives on to the very concept of intelligence now as you say were products of evolution our intelligence comes bundled with the obvious motives that you'd expect in a competitive process of evolution such as dominance competition for resources and there's a tendency to assume that anything that is intelligent will also come bundled with some urge to dominate and that's why you have I think rather misleading analogies like well we vanquish technologically less advanced societies when we colonize the world that we vanquish other species and therefore a more intelligent artificial system will inevitably vanquish us so I think this is bait now granted many of the proponents of artificial intelligence as an existential risk recognize that this is a fallacy simply because being smart and wanting something are just completely independent how you could have an artificial intelligence that sacrificed itself that they did nothing to do not care about its own longevity I use the analogy of the aisle caps creatures of the the schmooze which are the ultimate altruist these are highly intelligent creatures that barbecue themselves for our benefit because their altruism is built into their intelligence so these are totally independent and I think be a lot of the doomsayers recognize that but it keeps coming creep even though they explicitly disavow the idea that intelligence system will be megalomaniacal it creeps back into the scenarios like oh but then it will inevitably want to preserve its own existence maximize resources and therefore it'll consume us in the process so I think I think that's one recurring fallacy another one is just the assumption that there is such a thing as a scale of intelligence in which you can place why do you doubt that well why do you doubt that with respect to me granted there they're different forms of intelligence right so how you compare our intelligence in every respect to the intelligence intelligence of an octopus that's that's a hard problem yeah clearly there are things that an octopus is better at them than we are but for any dimension of intelligence that you would recognize clearly there's there's a continuum and there's no good reason to think that we are at the summit of any of them well we actually don't know a David Joyce for example argues that there is only one kind of intelligence that any intelligent system is going to have to depend on knowledge and there's only one way of acquiring knowledge and that is the process of conjecture and refutation right so it may be that aside from fear processing speed there isn't some different quantum or order of magnitude of intelligence greater than ours and indeed what our problem in a lot of these scenarios such as the AI system that will foil our attempt to contain it by brainwashing us by rewiring our brains and I'm not making these as you know I'm not making no marios that they met these people yes they they assume that there is a coherent thing called artificial general intelligence which I suspect is is not a coherent concept that intelligence that they are but it's an intelligence of human intelligence a coherent concept oh yeah but human intelligence is a number of different systems that solve particular problems that we faced in the course of our evolution and that we try to stretched by analogy and by education but the idea that if you take what humans have and just multiply it by ten or a hundred or thousand and have an ability to solve any problem I think is incoherent it almost in a lot of these discussions of AI existential risk the artificial general intelligence of the future is almost discrete you can also substitute the word God and the sentence would work just as well or the other analogy that I use is Laplace is demon the hypothetical entity that knows the position and velocity of every particle in the universe plugs them into Newton's laws other laws of physics and can predict what will happen at any point in the future the idea of a intelligence that will exponentially take off and be able to cure cancer brainwash us transmute elements into paperclips rewire our brains assumes that solutions to problems can become can be arrived at just by raw agitation without having to your own simulated experiments you can you can run experiments in simulation the simulations are only as good as the data that FIFA and the acquisition of knowledge depends on interacting with the real world which has to unfold according to the time scale of the real world and of course requires intense interfaces with the real world that we can either give or not give artificial intelligence systems I think the what would have to happen to worry you like what what do what development would make you think in our article yeah oh if if if for some reason the entire culture of safety among engineers mysteriously vanished and engineers did unbelievably stupid things like putting control of a of the water level of a dam in an untested and not very intelligent system and that where they gave it a very vague goal such as regulate the water level period and B to regulate the water level it drowned in town now again I'm not making this up this is not my example it's not a caricature it's not a straw man but I think it's from from Sir Martin Rees or somehow a an artificial intelligence system was built that had both this laplace's demon ability to calculate the state of the universe and somehow also managed to control every molecule of the universe and was given some goal like make people happy now I just actually I don't worry about that because that's what it would take toward me and that's not going to happen the other someone put in a self-improving AI onto the internet just it's out in the wild improving well something that can make changes to its own source code in a way that we don't its designers don't necessarily understand so what does that actually consist of I mean better is not a you can't have an algorithm that just achieves better nests better at something no yeah it could so let's say it just is better at you know trading stocks right what the thing that that worries me I mean far sooner than anything like super human AGI is going to arrive which is the idea that we are so there's something so potentially brittle about our civilization now given our dependence on something like the internet or something like you know financial markets let me just imagine what would happen if some brilliant company decided to unleash their their trading algorithms and you know the Dow inexplicably went to zero right and we had to figure out where all the money went right this is a very discrete problem that is probably conceivable computationally it's not you could imagine and this is I I guess this this connects to something like cyber terrorism or cyber war that you can imagine a a targeted disruption of the financial system say or the stock market that we would again it's it is like in some ways it's like terrorism it's like even or even a smaller problem like a school shooting you know 20 people die while 20 people die all the time for all kinds of reasons that we don't panic about but and here we're just talking about zeros and ones in in the cloud but if you can't figure out where your money went or how much you have for any significant period of time and this could be massively destabilizing and this is short of anything that is you know truly science-fictional well I I do worry about instability of financial markets because of features like instruments like like derivatives like high-speed trading that have built in positive feedback loops that could lead to crashes and bubbles as we experienced in that 2007-2008 I don't see that as a problem of artificial intelligence financial markets you can imagine that people the first thing that people in this arms race are going to try to do with their AI is make money with it it's not it's not we have a last thing I think that's the problem of making financial markets more resilient and less vulnerable to positive feedback loops I don't see that as a problem of artificial intelligence per se and I certainly don't think substantial threat know and so aside from the fact that I think a lot of the existential threat scenarios the idea that artificial intelligence more dangerous than nuclear weapons that it could be our final invention spell the end of humankind I think based on a number of fallacies by the way this is not just my analysis but Nick Bostrom who's one of the of course prime stokers of fear of existential risk did a survey among the hundred most frequently cited researchers in AI 92% discounted the the threat of catastrophe so in the near term I think I don't I don't think most people doubt the possibility of something like an intelligence explosion where actually I actually I I think I disagree if you look at the people that look at people like you know Rodney Brooks Peter Norvig Myhrvold so like I'm about to debate Rodney at a conference that Rodney is has been selected as a far outlier skeptic for the UH non this particular point and know if you like someone like Stuart Russell have you interacted with him because he's in he actually literally wrote the textbook on AI that as everyone's been using for for over a decade with Peter Norvig who yeah does just count the threat I mean even Stuart Russell Stuart's towards among the most concerned and he's quite quite alarmed by the lack of concern among many of his colleagues so yes although I think he actually answers some of his own concern when he said I quoted this in the book that we don't engineers don't talk about building bridges that don't fall down they talk about building bridges yeah but he was making that point to opposite effect he was that's how he expresses his alarm in the about the AI community just advancing the the project of building more intelligent machines and then thinking of AI safety as an afterthought maybe there's nobody who's building bridges who thinks the not falling down project is a separate conversation they need to have right yeah but in AI that's what's happening it there's this separate conversation about AI safety yeah I don't see that that is I don't I don't know any a I researcher who would say let's hand over the control of the water level behind a dam no I need someone else oh by the way and don't drown a town yeah I I don't just don't see it as a problem within the AI community and that's why most of the AI researchers are really don't take these scenario seriously but just about know just a prelude to say that the analysis that I have in enlightenment now is not I think it's is actually pretty typical of experts in AI and I think the problems in the spinning out the doomsday scenarios are confusion of intelligence with with motivation particular megalomania the mythical concept of an omniscient God like artificial intelligence artificial general intelligence which i think is an incoherent concept because intelligence is relevant relative to a goal and to knowledge and the idea that there's exponential improvement in artificial intelligence so that it will run away from us as it recursively improves its own intelligence in fact assessments of progress in artificial tones so no evidence of exponential growth if anything there's exponential growth in just the number of chips number of transistors you get on a chip in Moore's law but that doesn't translate into exponential improvement in intelligence not in fact probably a more typical and more accurate curve would be kind of an s-shaped curve where there's a period of reasonable growth and then as they say the last 1% of the problem takes as much effort and time and ingenuity is the first 99% which is why even though it seems like we're on the verge of self-driving cars which i think is a relative as AI problems go it's a relatively easy one but we're not even going to see door to door driverless cars anytime soon because it's what artificial intelligence researchers say all the ones that I know one of his hotels is really really hard it looks easy from a distance until you actually have to engineer a system but that people would actually use and in fact they are highly conscious of safety that's why we don't have driverless cars going door-to-door already it's not as if there that there's a AI safety community desk to remind the part of the self-driving car community oh it shouldn't mow down people that's like as if any engineering problem as in all of those curves that I showed of our engineering systems becoming safer over time that's just part of the culture of engineering including artificial intelligence well wouldn't you agree that since we don't know how quickly this is going to happen the any safe path toward developing it has to include the possibility of it happening faster than we've been assuming so that it's the safety of our current path is only guaranteed by virtue of it happening very slowly and incrementally that's probably not the safest possible path dissipate some something that is surprisingly fast no I I think that the idea of exponentially self-improving intelligence is probably incoherent because in reality it's going to depend on on knowledge and knowledge has to be acquired by interaction with the world Kevin Kelley has the the the term think ism for the idea that problems can be solved by sheer rational cogitation without any interaction with the world and I think I I do think that's a fallacy but let me just take a step back as to why why are we having this conversation why do i why do you care about why do I care about it I do think that there you know obviously anything that we build we should we should make a safe you know I just think and I don't I don't really see anyone in the artificial intelligence community who would deny that principle and would turn over huge amounts of infrastructure to a system that and tested the of course the counter-argument is well it'll be so smart that it will fool us into passing a test for safety because it wants to achieve control without our constraining it and again that gets to the fallacies of instant omniscience and megalomania so III don't worry about AI fooling us into thinking that it's safe and therefore escaping safety testing which is another one of the scenarios well just to put it just a just step back I think there is a risk that has has not been faced by some of the purveyors of these doom scenarios that if that if people are and by people I mean everyone are just given more more scenarios in which our civilization is doomed together with ones that I think should be taken seriously like climate change and nuclear war you pile on what what I consider to be rather exotic and extremely improbable ones they it can't be a good thing if a huge percent of the population firmly believes that our civilization is doomed as many do theirs polls show that something like 25 to 30% of Americans believe that our civilization is going to come to an end within a few decades is that a good thing for people constructively engaging with the problems that we have I don't think so and in fact other polls show that among people who think that our way of life is going to come to an end a majority say well we should just look after ourselves and our families because what life because our way what it's gonna continue there's nothing we can do about it I think that is itself a risk and that as we scare people to death as we remind them and we know also that the human sense of probability runs by number of imaginal both scenarios that if we as we start to pile on those scenarios then people can become fatalistic and not worth figuring why should I even conserve on on carbon emissions if if the global warming isn't gonna kill me then the runaway and is gonna turn me into paper clips or or make me a guinea pig and cancer experiments or or follow the command to make me happy by rewiring my brain or putting me into a jar and and brainwashing me to thinking I'm happy and all these others I think there is a real risk to that undisciplined disaster mongering that that has not been factored in to these to this line of thinking and I think that the sober thinking shows that most of these scenarios are ill-conceived you know okay yeah well I fully agree that we should worry about only those things that are worth worrying about where we agree they're one of these days I will drag you into a room with terrified AI researchers and and we'll perform an intervention on that note I want to open it up to questions from the audience because the real advantage of events like this is to make it a proper conversation and so there there are microphones that will be appearing in the audience in the aisles at each level and we will go as fast as we can well that's being prepared I will ask you one short rapid-fire question what what belief do you have could be a fundamental scientific belief or intuition or something else what what are you most certain of such that if the data contradicted it you wouldn't you would have to say that the data are nervous well I guess my my well probably that the that the mind is a completely determined by the physiological activity of the brain so if there were apparent demonstrations of precognition of telepathy of mind over matter of the sole surviving the death of the brain you know I would look those data twice Danna [Music] okay so we're going to go to questions I'll remind you that questions are great if they actually contain a question and if you you can't manage that just end on a high rising tone and we'll be full what practical advice would either of you have for improving the quality of conversation between two people who found themselves across an ideological divides on this yeah I think the first thing is to be able to restate the other person's position in a way that they would accept or if you can't meet that test you're not actually having a conversation you're certainly not having a profitable one so if you're going to pretend to be reading somebody's mind and finding their actual motives for saying what they're saying that they won't acknowledge right that's that's a different kind of kind of hostile grappling match then you need to actually change mine so you need to you need to first be able to interact with their actual view as they represent it to themselves and that's so rarely met in when you get to two politically polarizing topics that it's it's just amazing to see that it it almost never happens go back over here self do you think Stephen in probably three hundred years or four hundred years of the resources infinite is not infinite is finite and nation-states might get at each other's throat what are your thoughts on that yeah I think resource resource shortages are a red herring and I talk about this even though there's another kind of what ready used to book calls collapse anxiety when we fear that no matter how good day-to-day life seems to be improving we should still be on edge because it all might collapse tomorrow that the idea of resource shortages has loomed large in that kind of discussion and we've never run out of any resources and the reason is we don't need resources we need ways of getting around lighting our homes heating our homes eating and which resources we use to satisfy those needs depends on our state of knowledge which changes and as a resource starts to become scarce its price rises incentivizing people to figure out how to get it less accessible deposits or more often to switch to some other resource we've seen a we're in the midst of a rather dramatic process of dematerialization that thanks to electronic media especially smart phones we consume less less staff Lee reached peak stuff we consume less paper less newsprint a lot of resources not not less carbon which is something that we need to do but the problem of course with carbon isn't that we're going to run out of the stuff out of oil the problem is we've got there's too much of it so I think that resource shortages are red herring in terms of conflict between armed conflict between countries there is an unmistakable trend we don't know if it'll continue but if war between countries is becoming is obsolescent I guess a point made by John Muller as early as the 1980s that the classic kind of war where nation a declares war against nation B they face off with massive tank formations naval battles bombing each others as becoming is becoming rarer and rarer the the wars that occur are our civil wars some which can become quite nasty if they have outside intervention but conflicts between nations are fewer number and I think it's not utopian to think that in 3 or 400 years they could go the way of slave auctions and human sacrifice there are only a hundred ninety two nations increasingly realizing that war is a stupid way to resolve disputes and it's entirely possible that that could go the way of customs so we'll go up a level German thank you gentlemen both a lucid conversation now my name is Zack and I have another question in the vein of fostering better communication across ideological divides especially what are your recommendations for strategies for fostering better communication with people with whom we might dramatically defer in terms of identity culture and experience and particularly do you see a role either for suspending our own skepticisms or objections or for acknowledging the elements of truth and other people's experience however miscalibrated they may be in order to build their trust and connection exerts positive influence and to evolve our collective understanding thank you well actually I think I answered that question the first time around but I would add one other piece is that and this is this is something you have there's a no you struck a lot Steve identity doesn't matter for most of our truth claims I mean the fact that you are you identified in whatever way you want to be identified by color of your skin or the nation of your birth or your religious orientation that doesn't matter for any propositional claim you're gonna make them about the way the world is so it's just it we have to get over that I don't know if you have more on that topic but well I think in answering the previous question Sam did identify one of the techniques that has been identified as critical to having a constructive civilized discussion mainly summarized in your opponent's view in a way that they can agree to there are so there are some others there's a literature on fostering critical thinking and constructive disagreement it includes other things like just even being forced to explain your understanding of your own position a lot of people who are dead set against the trans-pacific partnership for example if you ask them what is the trans-pacific partnership and that there's a we have an illusion of understanding that can often be disabused when we're forced to defend things and then you find that some disagreements actually lessen when people are forced to come to common ground on what they're actually talking about another one is there's a technique in science that is occasionally used called adversarial collaboration where you get to people who disagree about a hypothesis to come to agree on what would settle it what experimental outcome and and encourage them to collaborate in just what conceivably could reduce their difference right there I met questions about evolution I'm curious what both of you would think about a world where things are getting increasingly complicated and we start to discover things that were hardwired to be ill fit for for example we're hardwired to crave sugar which is not a problem when we're hunter-gatherers but in a world where sugar is very abundant these problems arise do you worry about that on a general level yeah I think that is a source of a lot of our our discontent our problems a lot of our cravings are our addictions come from often from artificial substances that were synthesized precisely to engage those motivational systems and that will have to develop norms and therapies and expectations that are explicitly designed to marginalize our anachronistic or obsolete desires yeah I would add that much of our concern about social media now seems to be of a piece with that which is we're having an experience on social media that is completely unlike anything we've evolved to have so we just you have anonymity and no face-to-face interaction and the inter maniac comes out in every conversation go down here so veganism is a topic that means an awful lot to me and I'm not gonna be one of those guys that you know goes in here and tries to heckle people the way that vegans often get a reputation of militancy for and and I think that that's generally counterproductive but but my question is people will often reason their way to a moral position but you don't see them adopt that moral position in real life and I'm wondering why there's that disconnect of reason and application Robert Sapolsky in his recent book talked about associating things with disgust when it comes to morality and there being you having to do something to that effect to actually apply morals that you reason to I'm wondering what both of your thoughts are about this well it's hard to do what you acknowledge is good that's that's one question that whether or not veganism is actually the most moral prescription I think we can debate that but but do you have a sense of of the the crazy problem that you you know what you should be doing but you find it hard to actually do yeah I think that is part of the part of the human condition and we we redo because we have these built-in drives we like the taste of meat they're like like a lot of things that we can't justify and it's a question of a combination of self-control and norms that we share that push us away from urges that we cannot justify that is one part of our human nature namely you don't want to be looked down upon by people you respect can push back against another namely you you enjoy activities that you can't justify yeah I mean norms do a lot of work that we can't individually do right so it's it's just it's hard if you had to get up every morning and reinvent civilization for yourself it would be hard to be a civilized person and it's so much of what we F er tlie do that is good and moral and civil is the result of our having internalized norms that everyone is abiding by and so it just there will be you there certainly could come a time but we will look back on the details of factory farming and it'll be like looking back on the slave holders of the relatively distant past and we'll just be aghast that it was ever so I think there's an interesting ethical wrinkle with respect to the prospect of farming in such a way that the the lives of farm animals are net positive right so that it's better to have it existed as a cow than to have not existed at all and if we have some sense that these are indeed happy cows well then it would be better to raise them and treat them well and then finally eat them than it would be to do not have done any of that and managed to just engineer tofu that is so so healthy that we can live off of it so I think it's it's it's an interesting ethical problem but I would certainly acknowledge that what we have currently is not like that and that it is a horror show dr. Pinker you've written about how contemporary art denigrates beauty which makes me curious about what contemporary living art you do enjoy specifically in visual arts not music or performance did you say that that can you said apparently the Contemporary Art denigrates beauty and she wants to know what the hell are you talking about what contemporary artists living artists do you enjoy visual artists performance or music oh she's where to begin there are there are a lot that I'm not gonna instead of naming names I'll just say that there I strongly believe there should be a diversity of art forms that that different people have different obviously at different tastes there are different theories behind the the purpose and function of different art forms my comment was just from the blank slate wasn't so much a recommendation of what art when taught to consume or enjoy or produce but just a historical comment that a lot of the denigration of beauty in contemporary art the fact that when often goes to museums of contemporary artists and sees works that are deliberately grotesque I think comes from a denial of human nature the endorsement of a theory of the blank slate the idea that we don't have any aesthetic standards built-in which is I think dominated a lot of intellectual culture in the 20th century and so it was more of an explanation of why the art world is growing this this direction than a statement of either my own tastes or a recommendation as to what other other people ought to value in art can we go up you guys think that the Enlightenment is they peak or end-all-be-all of ideas for human flourishing and if not where do you think that where next revolution will come from well be certainly the ideas that were advanced in the second half of the 18th century could not possibly be the the peak because that would contradict some of those very ideas namely that there is an open-ended process of scientific and rational discovery of a possibly escalating set of standards as to who's flourishing we should try to to maximize as David Deutsch put it and then summarize this quote we're always at the beginning of infinity the idea of the Enlightenment to us that there isn't a peak that that the we can always ask in the case of scientific understanding what is the best explanation for the best theory that we have now how do we dig deeper and continue to ask the question why is the world like this why is this theory the one that seems to hold and that is a process that can go on forever I don't think there's any limit to the kinds of suffering that we can seek to live alleviate once we make enough people happy then we can also expand it to other sentient creatures so it's the process that's open-ended rather than a particular set of principles that were that could possibly open that the peak or the pinnacle appear thank you so this was I just wanted you to expand a little bit you mentioned identity politics and very often mr. Harris you focus on it as a scourge on the left and I'm wondering if there's a reason that you don't recognize it or make much importance of it on the right oh well it's those are all the applause waiting for me to overcome my fascism well it's just so obviously a problem on the right it's just does anything need to be said about why is problematic to be a white supremacist or a neo-nazi or it's just it's it's a place where it masquerades as finely calibrated morality is on the left and that's the problem the main concerns that the unfortunately now to see Stephen Hawking had was that of the end of humanity in particular he would often discuss the proliferation of nuclear weapons artificial intelligence and the inevitable danger of climate change and if I remember correctly he gave humanity around a hundred years left to live that seems like a rather you know short time span from now I would probably bump it up to 500 but my question specifically was whether or not you guys think we have anything to be concerned in regards to our seemingly inevitable extinction well I'm the pessimist up here so don't ask me well you you acknowledge that if we could come back in a thousand years we might be unrecognizable to ourselves or ten thousand years in the well like at what point do you think things will look deeply unfamiliar for us even if we even if our ancestors survived well I'll think of the question of whether there were whether we will be around in a hundred years the one that the questioner raised I think the attitude has to be funny we don't know for sure but what we ought to do is to identify the risks as reasonably as possible and to map out ways of dealing with them as I said I don't think that runaway artificial intelligence either of the met maniacal variety or of the collateral damage variety is an existential risk and I think the all engineering raises risks that that any responsible engineer would deal with as the technology is implemented I do think that that the risk of nuclear war is serious enough that we should pursue some of the policies that have already reduced the risks such as I didn't get to show a slide but the nuke world's nuclear arsenal has already been reduced by 85 percent since the height of the Cold War there are at the reasonable roadmaps to bringing that down to zero the gold global zero movement advocated not by starry-eyed peaceniks and romantics but by some of the most hard-headed cold war hawks like Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn George Shultz William Perry which who explicitly called for a pathway to zero Barack Obama mentioned it in a famous speech and that's one of the reasons he got the Nobel Peace Prize now we've gone in the opposite direction with the rise of Putin and and Donald Trump but there's no reason to think that that is a permanent diversion from the goal and we should resume it as rapidly as possible together with making the systems that we do have as resilient and stable as possible putting nuclear weapons on a long fuse reducing the possibilities of false alarms with a goal toward eliminating them all together likewise with climate change the there are pathways to decarbonize in the economy involving carbon pricing involving development of zero carbon technologies eventually technologies that will suck co2 out of the atmosphere that we should pursue aggressively and so I don't think that we can we should either resign ourselves to this being our final century nor be heedless of the very real challenges that we face so I apologize there's never a good time to cut this off but I'm just going to take one more question because we have a book signing to do steve has written a wonderful book the hope to hold your applause until till the actual end but I'm getting you're ready for it he's written a book that has just not has not been exhausted by our conversation and that will be for sale in the lobby and I will be sitting alongside him signing postcards so if you have time after we finish here please come up and say hi but I want to take one question because I feel like you've got shortchanged here what is the most significant and strongly held belief you possessed that you subsequently changes your mind on a good question why did you have to make it so good do you have a ready answer for that do you have a would I think in the transition between the time I wrote the blank slate which had a somewhat tragic view of the human condition because it argued for human nature with all of its flaws and shortcomings and self-centeredness and biases and so on and the time that I wrote the better angels of our nature when I became more aware of all of the areas of human improvement and and developed a more optimistic view of the human condition that I would identify as the main change in my overall view of the human condition I actually don't have a great answer for you I have changed my position it was strongly held on on various topics like the death penalty at one point I was for it and now I'm strongly against it and that was just a very simple process of reasoning myself out of it it relates to my beliefs about free will and and related matters actually AI was another change for me that came a couple years ago I thought I would have probably two years ago I would have agreed very much with Steve that this is just a cockamamie fantasy that either that people are there's basically nothing that should inform our thinking from a thought experiment like Nick Bostrom's paper cliff Maximizer but now I'm I'm convinced that it actually is a legitimate worry if and it's possible to do badly so it's but yeah I mean I'm I should say I find it very satisfying to have sweeping changes like that and they don't come often enough I mean I'm sure there are many things that were all wrong about that we hold very close and it's people we totally act as though we we want to resist those moments where we're being dragged into a new point of view and we live most much of our lives are predicated on really intellectually or on resisting those moments but it is a relief to finally be dragged to a new position that seems better and I think it's it really is thrilling so before we go I just want to thank Steve for being the inaugural guess and I'll say well we'll be back in in two months Antonio Damasio a very brilliant neuroscientist has written a book about the brain and culture and we will be moving to the theater at the Ace Hotel in two months and I hope to see all of you there or actually half of you there because it's just a smaller room so that's happening there and again Steve thank you for thank you for joining me it's really an honor [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Critical Thoughts

Views: 368,792

Rating: 4.8146195 out of 5

Keywords: sam harris, steven pinker, debate, waking up, book club

Id: ByGC3Vwaio0

Length: 106min 52sec (6412 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 04 2018