Making Sense with Sam Harris - #395 — Intellectual Authority and Its Discontents

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Sam Harris discusses the breakdown of trust in institutions, the nature of intellectual authority, the danger of bad incentives, the epidemic of conspiracy thinking and misinformation, Trump and Elon, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. First, I have an announcement to make. We are making a simple but important change to the platform over here. We're combining the Making Sense Podcast with my Substack newsletter. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that it will just be better for everyone. It'll be better for you because you'll be able to get everything I produce in audio, video, and print with one subscription, and it'll be better for me because I won't be pulled in two directions, needing to create content for separate audiences divided by a paywall. Going forward, I'll decide whether something's best done in audio, video, or print, or some

combination of the three, and then just send it out to everyone. Substack also hosts podcasts, so we'll eventually put my audio and video there, too, and it has live video that I'll experiment with at some point. So if you're currently an annual subscriber to both the podcast and the newsletter, that is, you are paying for the Making Sense podcast through my website, and you are paying for the newsletter over at Substack, we'll be reaching out to you by email to say that we've consolidated your subscription. And of course, you'll see reduced pricing. There shouldn't be anything you need to do on your end, because you already have access to everything. And we'll delay renewing your subscription at

the lower price so you'll get some free months added to your account. So you won't pay a penalty for us not having figured out that the platform should have been combined from the very beginning. If you're currently an annual subscriber to the podcast or the newsletter, that is, you are paying for one of them, your email address will soon give you access to everything. There may be a few kinks to be worked out in integrating the two platforms, but going forward, whether you're subscribed through my website or through Substack, won't matter. And of course, we'll send an email reminding you of this when everything is sorted out. And if you have any problems, just email support at samharris.org and someone will help you.

As always, if you can't afford a subscription, email support at samharris.org and you'll be given one for free. Or you'll be given the option to pay whatever you want. As you know, I can only have this policy because most of you who can afford to pay for a subscription actually do. And that is a wonderful thing. You make this flexible business model possible. And just as important, you have immunized me against many of the concerns that make other people in media afraid to say what they really think on a wide variety of important issues. I suspect that many of you still might not understand how rare my situation is, so it's probably worth spelling out. I've consciously built a business that allows me to be honest about all the lunacy on both sides of our politics.

about all the lunacy on both sides of our politics. As a matter of principle, I simply wouldn't do this any other way. But the point is, I couldn't do it without you paying subscribers. Because of the platform we've built together, my only job is to say what I really think, even when what I think is unpopular or inconvenient for my side of an argument. Very few people have this freedom. Most successful podcasters are palpably constrained by their audience metrics,

against which they sell ads. I don't have any sponsors, and I don't track any metrics. And this isn't an accident. I realized years ago that if I was going to spend my time discussing controversial issues and ideas, I had to do it in a way that both allowed me to be honest and to be perceived as being honest. This is one reason why I've avoided ads. I mean, I could honestly read ads here. There are many companies and products that I love, but I didn't want to have to think about their brand concerns when deciding who to talk to or what to talk about. And not having sponsors has given me extraordinary freedom to just think out loud and to create a successful business while doing it. Again, I don't think this is obvious to most people. Why is a subscription model so much

better than running ads? Well, just think about it. How easy would it be for me to say something or to have something said about me that could cause half a dozen or a dozen reputable sponsors to get spooked and stop supporting the podcast? Now imagine what I would have to say or have said about me that would lead tens of thousands of subscribers to suddenly cancel their subscriptions. There really is security in numbers. And sponsors are much more fickle than subscribers, for good reason. They have their own reputations to worry about. However, having subscribers can still leave a person susceptible to audience capture, that is, if they have the wrong type of audience. And from my point of view,

many podcasts and newsletters have cultivated the wrong type of audience. Many of the biggest podcasters know that they can't afford to alienate their right-leaning or left-leaning listeners, or their establishment or anti-establishment listeners, because they've built the type of audience that wants its biases pandered to. Some of these people touch very controversial topics, but you'll notice that they do it always from one side, and the hate that they get is always from the other side. But I don't have a side, and that is a very different situation to be in. I need to be free to alienate either side by turns. Early on, I noticed that a significant part of my audience grew outraged whenever I bumped up against left-wing orthodoxy.

So I made it a point not to care. And when I noticed that another part of my audience supported Trump, I also refused to care. Those of you who have been with me for several years know that talking about issues like racism and police violence and Islam and identity politics has effectively gotten me cancelled on the left. There's no question, in my mind at least, that had I had a normal job in media or at a university somewhere around 2018, I would have been fired because of how fully I was smeared by certain prominent people on the left. And later on, I was smeared by certain prominent people on the left. And later on, my views about Trump and COVID and populism and America First isolationism and social media and misinformation, all the bullshit around Hunter Biden's laptop, all of that effectively got me canceled on the right.

But the result is exactly what I want. Most of you don't get to see this. The result is that my core audience has been steadily purged of partisan stupidity, all the while continuing to grow. I've built an audience that values how I arrive at conclusions, rather than the conclusions themselves. I have an audience that isn't content for me to be right or to imagine that I'm right for the wrong reasons. You don't want me taking cheap shots at the other side or to just be a team player, because for me and for most of you, there is no permanent other side. I'm not on a team, and if there's a weakness in one of my arguments, you want me to be the first to spot it. I don't know if you've noticed, but that is not what is happening in most of our media, whether mainstream or independent.

If I know anything about my core audience, it's that you want me to embody certain standards of intellectual and ethical integrity. The point is not where I arrive. It's how I get there. So subscribing here isn't the same as buying one of my books simply because you want to read it. If you're a subscriber, you're supporting the next thing I say or do, not merely the last thing. I can change my mind about anything.

I can grow interested in or tired of anything. And that is a freedom that most people in media simply do not have. Even some of the most successful people in media are condemned to fit a pattern defined by their audience. I'm really not. And those of you who subscribe make this freedom possible, allowing me to continue to argue for basic sanity, which will remain necessary for some time to come. So, as always, thank you for your support. Okay, and now for an important topic on which I appear to have offended many, many people, about which many of these offended people appear profoundly confused. I think this is somewhere near the center of our most pressing cultural problems, especially the

shattering of our information landscape and the resulting hyper-polarization of our politics. The result of this, especially on the right, is an increasingly conspiratorial view of the world. Rather than recognize that bad outcomes are often due to ignorance or incompetence, people on the right seem to see malevolent competence and coordination everywhere. This shattering is also fueling widespread contempt for institutions. Needless to say, any response to this contempt from the institutions themselves tends to be dismissed as just more sinister machinations on the part of the elites. Now, some of this populist backlash is understandable, but increasingly

this seems like a cultural death spiral to me. Our institutions simply must regain public trust. The question is, how can they do that? At the core of this problem lurks a fundamental question about the nature of intellectual authority. When do we rely on it, and when are we right to ignore it, or even repudiate it? Everyone knows that you shouldn't argue from authority. You can't say, what I'm saying is true because I am saying it, or it's true because Einstein said it, or because it's been published in a prestigious journal. If a theory is true, or a fact is really a fact, it is so independent of the identity of the person adducing it. Consequently, no sane expert ever really argues from authority.

What actually happens is something that is easily mistaken for this, which is that people often rely on authority as a proxy for explaining or even understanding why something is true. It's a little like using money as a medium of exchange rather than hauling around valuable objects or commodities. It's easier to carry dirty paper in your pocket than a barrel of oil or a bushel of wheat. In the same way, it's easier to carry dirty paper in your pocket than a barrel of oil or a bushel of wheat. In the same way, it's easier to say or to think that gravity is identical to the curvature

of spacetime because Einstein proved it than it is to really understand the general theory of relativity. It's a shortcut that's necessary for just about everyone most of the time. The crucial point is that there is a difference between rejecting any argument from authority and rejecting the value or reality of authority itself. For instance, I often speak with physicists on this podcast, and when I do, it is appropriate for me to assume that they know their field better than I do. After all, that is what specialization is. If I spent as much time studying physics as a professional physicist and proved competent at that task, I would be a physicist. And when talking to a physicist, it is important for me to understand that I'm not one. Of course, this is true for any other area of specialization.

If I'm talking to Siddhartha Mukherjee about cancer, it is only decent and sane for me to acknowledge, if merely tacitly by asking questions and listening to the answers, that he, being a celebrated oncologist, knows more about cancer than I do. There simply is such a thing as expertise, and to not acknowledge this is just idiotic. And to move through life not acknowledging it is to turn the whole world into a theater of potential embarrassment. Relying on authority can produce errors, of course, in the same way that some of the money in your wallet could prove to be counterfeit.

But not relying on it, shunning it, just, quote, doing one's own research, is guaranteed to produce more errors, at least in the aggregate. After all, what is one doing when one is, quote, doing one's own research, if not seeking out what the best authorities have to say on a given topic. What the phrase doing your own research usually refers to are the efforts that people make to sort through information, mostly online, when they no longer trust what most mainstream experts have to say. Usually what this means is they have gone in search of other voices

that are telling them what they want to hear, or perhaps what they don't want to hear, but it's now coming with a compelling, conspiratorial, or contrarian slant. You don't trust what the most respected doctors have to say, because you think they've all been captured by big pharma, perhaps. So you found a guy in Tijuana who says he can cure your cancer. You don't trust what the Mayo Clinic says about vaccines, and now you're afraid to get your kids vaccinated because you've listened to 14 hours of RFK Jr.

on podcasts. And now you've started trusting him as, what, a new authority. We can't break free of the circle of authority. Of course, I'm not denying that it's possible to do truly original research, where you become the new authority, but that is not what we're talking about here. Doing one's own research almost never entails running the relevant experiments in virology oneself, or searching the Soviet archives oneself, or translating the speech from Arabic oneself, or interviewing the long-dead politician oneself. Most of the time, we simply have to trust that other people did their work responsibly, that their data isn't fabricated,

that they didn't devote their entire careers to perpetrating an elaborate hoax. Again, there are exceptions, but they are simply not relevant most of the time. That is what it means to be an exception. Most of the time, if you no longer trust the experts, you've started trusting someone's uncle. Most of the time, real experts who have been trained in the relevant disciplines through real institutions offer the best approximation of our knowledge within a field. This is no more debatable than the claim that most of the time our best basketball players are in the NBA. Is it possible to find someone

outside the NBA who's amazing at basketball? Of course. Is it also possible to find someone in the NBA who shouldn't be there? Probably. Though it's also safe to say that such a person will spend most of his time sitting on the bench. It is simply a fact that if you had to find the best basketball players in America in some reasonable time frame, you could do a lot worse than grab the NBA All-Stars from any given year. And so it is with scientists and historians and other specialists at our most elite institutions. And there are two important caveats to this general rule. The first is that there are fake disciplines, or those that are mostly fake, whole fields of scholarship that pretend to be scientific, or at least intellectually rigorous,

but they are mostly or entirely a sham. And secondly, there are real areas of scholarship that have been corrupted to one or another degree by politics or other bad incentives. For instance, one cannot with any confidence venture into a department of Middle Eastern studies at an American university and get a morally sane, much less accurate account of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, or between Western values and those of conservative Islam. But the reasons for that failure are also knowable and ultimately correctable. I mean, one reason is that Qatar, an Islamic theocracy and patron of terrorists, has given more money to U.S. universities than any other country on earth has. This is a totally bizarre situation that fairly shrieks of intellectual corruption,

if not suicide. But again, the problem here is understandable and can be fixed. And it is simply one version of the problem of bad incentives. The reason to worry about bad incentives is that we understand how they corrupt people. This is why the Upton-Sinclair line is so famous, because it captures a perennial problem in society. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Of course, this relates to what I was saying about my business model a few moments ago. Insofar as it's possible, you want to remove the bad incentives from your life. And collectively, we have to worry about bad incentives

distorting our view of what's important or even of what is real. Now, most of the current skepticism about establishment institutions and about mainstream expertise generally is the result of the various failures of scientific thinking and communication that occurred during the COVID pandemic. While many of these failures were significant, there is no question that they have been magnified and distorted by our politics. In a previous podcast, I made an invidious comparison between Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, two doctors who are now widely demonized right of center, and RFK Jr. My point wasn't to absolve Fauci and Collins of all responsibility for mismanaging our

response to COVID. For all I know, both men should be investigated. I have no idea what we would find. I was simply pointing out that these guys exist within a culture of science where intellectual embarrassment, and worse, is still possible. RFK Jr. doesn't. He is a crackpot and a conspiracy nut. That doesn't mean he's wrong about everything, and that doesn't mean turning him loose on the bureaucracy of the HHS might not do some good. Perhaps it will. Is he the best person to do that good? Of course not. But it is possible for the wrong person to occasionally do the right thing. However, whatever good RFK Jr. may accomplish in the future, my point stands. Unlike Fauci or Collins, he has no intellectual reputation to maintain. He can drag a dead bear into Central Park and

stage a fake bike accident with it, and it just serves to burnish his brand for his idiotic fans. He can also spread lies and misinformation about vaccines in a multi-decade contrarian grift, and he will continue to thrive in a parallel reality where Andrew Wakefield, the fraud who originally linked the MMR vaccine with autism, is considered an unfairly maligned scientific authority. If Fauci and Collins, or any other scientists, are guilty of scientific misconduct, that is something that can be found out, and their reputations will really suffer. Not among cultists and freaks, but among the people who hold their reputations in trust, other scientists. Real scientists and scholars and journalists can be convicted of

misconduct or hypocrisy or some other betrayal of intellectual standards because they have such standards to betray. There are no standards of intellectual integrity in Trumpistan, and there are no standards of ethical integrity either. If you live there, it is literally impossible to be a hypocrite. In Trump's orbit, if you're caught cheating on your wife or your taxes, you can say, whoever said I wasn't going to cheat on my wife or my taxes, fuck you, and you win. The truth is, RFK Jr. doesn't belong anywhere near the levers of power that govern health policy in America. But again, this doesn't mean that he's wrong about everything.

And it doesn't mean that he can't possibly do some good. And I hope he does, if he actually gets confirmed. There are bad incentives in the business of medicine and medical insurance and pharmaceuticals, and it would be very good for someone to try to sort them out. These are very basic distinctions I'm making. But over on X, that paradise for free speech, and on many prominent podcasts,

such distinctions appear impossible to understand. There are edge cases, of course, that can be genuinely difficult to resolve. For instance, what about the possibility of the lone, self-taught genius who just comes crashing through established orthodoxy, bearing a new gospel? How do we recognize that when it arrives? Conversely, and much more common, what about the pedigreed expert who looks perfect on paper? He's got all the right degrees and is published in good journals.

But due to some quirk in his wiring, he becomes a crank or a lunatic. And now he's on Joe Rogan's podcast. And somewhere around the four-hour mark, he divulges that he was once abducted and lavishly probed by extraterrestrials. It should be obvious that either way, mere credentialism isn't a perfect filter. A PhD from Caltech guarantees something. It more or less guarantees that a person is smart, but it can't guarantee that they are sane. And it really is possible for someone to come from outside a field

and make important contributions within it. There is no formula for resolving doubt in such cases, beyond getting other smart people who are adequate to the conversation, that is, other real authorities, to render their judgment. Whether to spend time doing this oneself and risk wasting time, or harder still, whether to give such a person a public platform so that many more people can hear and respond to their views, can be hard to decide. And I've made no secret of the fact that I think other prominent podcasters have screwed this up repeatedly. Many have made a habit of talking to people who quite obviously don't clear the bar, and it's embarrassing. What's more, it's been damaging to the public conversation about several important issues.

However, I'm probably guilty of making some bad calls myself, and I will probably make mistakes in the future. But these are edge cases for a reason. They're hard to figure out. My general policy is that the most respected mainstream voices on most topics are generally worth listening to. Again, in many fields, on many topics, it's like finding your next free-throw shooter in the NBA. Not a bad place to look. Of course, there are exceptions.

But RFK Jr. on vaccines isn't one of them. And neither is the comedian Dave Smith on U.S. foreign policy. Nor is Tucker Carlson on any topic other than what the hell happened to him. Those are easy calls. We're watching our political, intellectual, and even moral culture get torched every hour of the day on social media. And Elon Musk is now one of the greatest arsonists out there, while he and his fans pretend that he's the fire marshal coming to the rescue. Elon is being celebrated by legions of credulous and

self-deceived people as the person who is doing more than anyone to restore and protect the integrity of our public conversation, while he's probably doing more than anyone to sabotage it. He's become almost an apostle of a new religion whose sacrament is algorithmically amplified bullshit. And like many religious figures, he simply does not care about misleading people. He isn't noticing his errors, much less correcting them to say nothing of apologizing

for them. And if you notice them for him, you become his enemy, fit only to be smeared and lied about in his digital hall of mirrors. You have to be able to hold two thoughts in your head at the same moment. Yes, the man is the most talented entrepreneur of his generation. And yes, he has become a total asshole. And to call him reckless and irresponsible is an understatement. He simply does not care if he spreads dangerous, defamatory lies. And if you wonder whether I tried my best to get through to him in private before saying this sort of thing in public, I did. And it has been

nauseating to watch Elon pass the various loyalty tests laid out for him by Trump, minimizing the significance of January 6th, for instance. It's interesting to wonder what role incentives could play here. I mean, how has the richest and one of the most famous and powerful men on earth been incentivized to behave this way? Well, as I've said before, I think social media has played a major role here. At some point, Elon became a kind of attention monster, which is what Trump has always been. I think it's safe to say that attention, especially adulation from the wrong audience, is bad for you. In any case, if you think that concerns about misinformation and disinformation and the spread

of conspiracy thinking are just fake, they're just smokescreens thrown up by people who don't like free speech and favor government censorship. And you think all the freewheeling fuckery on social media from Trump and Elon is necessary and noble? You're in a cult. Spreading obvious lies is not necessary or noble. Amplifying baseless and divisive conspiracy theories, and ridicule, and hatred, isn't necessary or noble. But this is what Trump and Elon have done, at scale, for years now. If you're politically right of center, and you believe that the problem of conspiracy thinking is exaggerated, what do you think about it over on the left? Admittedly, it's not as big a problem over there, but it definitely exists. And for

instance, there are people who believe that Trump faked that first assassination attempt against him. Have you heard about this? Like most conspiracy theories, it's ridiculous, but there are people who believe this. If you don't like the phrase conspiracy theory, one stigmatizes some of the Trumpist garbage you're attached to. Do you resist its application here to the truly ludicrous idea that Trump hired someone to shoot him in the ear? The shooter killed an innocent person and then got killed himself for all the trouble he took to perfectly nick Trump's ear. What do you think about a person whose adventures online, just doing his own research,

have convinced him that this is the best explanation of what we all saw? The problem of misinformation runs the other way, too, and I've defended Trump against the most glaring instance of it, not the so-called Russiagate or Russia collusion hoax. Any of you who have these phrases rattling around in your head are, again, in a cult, and you have forgotten, if you ever even knew, all the ways in which Trump and his 2016 campaign

were compromised by weird connections to Russia. The fact that Paul Manafort was running his campaign, in and of itself, was worthy of investigation. Lobbying for foreign interests was that guy's whole career. Even Republican senators acknowledged that Manafort posed a serious counterintelligence risk, and he proved to be such an upstanding citizen that he was sentenced to years in prison. Of course, Trump then pardoned him. Nothing to see here, fellas. Trump's corruption has always been in plain view and has never acquired allegations of a hidden criminal conspiracy. Anyone who uses the

phrase Russiagate or the Russia collusion hoax is guaranteed to be wrong about what the Mueller report actually said. The truth is, you have no idea what was in the Mueller report, and you don't care. And ditto for the January 6th commission report. You're not tracking any of this because you're in a cult. It's the cult of, who gives a shit, you elitist asshole? Burn it all down. It's the cult of, who gives a shit, you elitist asshole? Burn it all down. The clearest case of misinformation against Trump that I'm aware of was the very fine people on both sides calumny. And almost everyone left of center still believes that after that rally in Charlottesville,

Trump praised the assembled neo-Nazis and white supremacists as, quote, very fine people. They believe this because a clip from one of his press conferences was edited to make it seem like he said this. We are being driven insane as a species, one misleading clip at a time. As I've pointed out many times before, if you watch Trump's remarks in context, you will see that the claim that he was praising neo-Nazis and white supremacists is a lie. And I have debunked this lie many, many times, both on this podcast and in print, to the consternation of people on the left who just want to score points against Trump and Trumpism without any concern for their own ethical or intellectual integrity. Needless to say, I've done this not out of any love for Trump or his influence on our politics, but out of a hatred for lies. But Trump and Elon and the cults that they have built are comfortable with lies and half-truths and endless bullshit.

They are perfectly content to watch our political culture succumb to an algorithmically mediated delirium, and they seem to have no concern about destroying important institutions, and in many cases declare themselves eager to destroy them. Again, I'm not rooting for these guys to fail, and nothing I've said here is predicated on the conviction that they will. All of my complaints about Trump and Elon and their leveraging of populist irrationality and rage refer to harms that have already occurred. Moral injuries to our society that we have already suffered. Dangerous lies that were already told with the full knowledge that they were lies. Who knows what will happen in the future?

At least it will not be boring. Thanks for listening.