Source Material
This essay will go into depth about things Sam Harris said in episode 335 of his podcast. Here is a link to a transcript, so you can read it for yourself. I have not corrected its typos (Brett for Bret, Lab League for Lab Leak, a few others) but believe you can understand it just fine.
Quotes from the transcript of the most recent episode of Sam’s podcast have a Timestamp and are shown in italics.
Quotes From Sam Harris’s Book, Lying
“Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission)…most of what I say is relevant to lies of omission and to deception generally.”
and
“The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness. And most of us do not require a degree in philosophy to distinguish this attitude from its counterfeits…..Whatever our purpose in telling them, lies can be gross or subtle. Some entail elaborate ruses or forged documents. Others consist merely of euphemisms or tactical silences….The moment we consider our dishonesty from the perspective of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed….”
— Sam Harris, Lying (emphasis added)
Accusations that Sam lied are based on his definitions of lying as quoted here.
Note on Conflicts of Interest
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are personal friends, people I love and towards whom I feel a great deal of loyalty. This means that seeing them unfairly criticized—especially when I know for a fact that the criticism is bullshit—emotionally activates me. But knowing them well also means that I know, far better than most people, just how they handle epistemic humility and accountability.
Without exception, every single time I’ve thought that they got something wrong, I have felt entirely free—indeed, explicitly encouraged—to let them know. I have called, texted, or emailed multiple times because I thought one or both of them got something wrong. In every case, I was questioned until my point of view was deeply and entirely understood. Then my concerns were given serious thought and, when appropriate, action. Bret in particular may be the easiest man alive to talk to on this topic. How many human males do you think fit into the Venn diagram of PhD scientists, NYT bestselling authors, celebrities, and people of whom it is true that “dorky friends not anywhere as educated or smart as he is, twerps who grew up in trailer parks, are both allowed and encouraged to call and say ‘dude, I think you fucked up’…”? How many would fit into a Venn diagram of even three of those four conditions? If you know of a second guy who would, email me. I’d like to meet him.
Judgments as to whether my competing interests affected my conclusions are left to the reader.
Oops! He Did It Again.
Episode 335 of Sam Harris’s podcast, released on September 22, 2023, was a post-mortem on his response to COVID. After repeated disappointments, several of them genuinely heartbreaking, I knew better than to get my hopes up.
The episode was worse than I feared. A lot worse.
He re-stated his thesis from his recent appearance on the Impact Theory podcast that there comes a point, if a pandemic is bad enough and a vaccine safe enough, when any sane person would want the government to mandate vaccines. Attacking that argument is my main reason for writing this, but he goes off into la-la land in several places that I feel obligated to mention, as well.
This essay would be longer than the transcript of the episode if I gave it the full debunking treatment it deserves, but the amount of dishonesty in the episode is breathtaking, so I’m going to point out some of his excursions into la-la land first.
La-La Land Excursion #1: There’s No Such Thing As A Mistake
Timestamp 23:52 (emphasis added) “Did we make mistakes in our response to COVID? Absolutely. But it's important to recognize that some of those mistakes were only mistakes in hindsight. They weren't mistakes at the time. Let me consider school closures. School closures made total sense until they didn't. I was absolutely in favor of closing the schools in March of 2020, and I was against keeping them closed at some later date. I would have to do some research to figure out when that was. But it was not a mistake to close the schools, given all that we didn't know at the time….As far as I can tell, there's no clear lesson to draw from our experience with school closures at this point because it turns out that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is unusual. Most flus and other infectious illnesses are worse for kids. So what should we do at the start of the next pandemic when the epidemiology of the virus is poorly understood? It seems almost certain that we should close the schools again.”
School closures were the easiest situation about which unintended consequences could be accurately predicted. Schools do a terrible job of both raising and educating kids, but they do one thing very well: feeding kids. They are the only places where millions of very poor American children regularly get decent meals.
Additionally, teachers report 700,000 cases of substantiated child abuse every year. Closing schools hurt many more kids than it helped, and this was predictable from the very beginning. Every adult I know who needed mandated reporter eyes on us when we were kids knew this.
By the way, Bret and Heather talked about this on an early pandemic livestream. Why? Because I told them they missed this very important consideration, and they are perfectly willing to have their blind spots pointed out to them.
That Sam continues to assert that closing schools wasn’t a mistake, and even proposes we do it again next time, betrays an inability to update that’s startling even for him.
La-La Land Excursion #2: Sam Lying By Consciously Conflating
Timestamp 22:06. The few times I've spoken on these topics, I have clearly stated that one, I'm not an expert in any of the relevant fields. Neither are Joe and Bret, by the way.
This bit of narcissistic manipulation is meant to make you think that Sam Harris considers himself to be on equal footing with Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan, all of them equally non-experts. It is meant to increase your trust and make you think kindly of Sam’s “humility” in admitting this. It is also meant to not-so-subtly cause you to put Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan into the same box with regard to scientific insight.
It’s another lie.
Joe has never claimed to be an expert on anything he talks to his guests about, just a guy who likes to talk to interesting people.
Sam Harris has a PhD in neuroscience that he earned by writing a philosophy paper — later turned into his interesting book, The Moral Landscape. It’s a great book, by the way, which you can order from Amazon, who properly lists it in the “Religion & Spirituality - Religious Studies” section (though an argument could be made that the philosophy section would also be appropriate) here.
Sam Harris is correct here — he is not an expert in anything related to the discussion of how a novel pathogen evolves and how that evolution should be responded to, managed, and handled by a society.
Bret, an evolutionary biologist, is an expert on the topic of how evolution works and is in fact highly qualified to discuss what the evolution of a novel life form might look like, what paths it might take, and the possible evolutionary outcomes of various tactics to manage it.
Sam generally has (or appears to have) more respect for his audience than this, so in this case the person he’s mostly lying to is probably himself.
La-La Land Excursion #3: Maybe Lying, Maybe Just Dumb
Sam quotes a study asserting that Republicans had a 43% higher probability of dying from COVID and chalks this up to vaccine hesitancy.
Either he learned nothing about study design and statistics while writing his religious studies book in graduate school (which, fair) or he is pretending he doesn’t know the study he refers to is junk. Here’s that famous bastion of conservative apologia, The Washington Post, reporting on the study:
In their paper, Yale researchers Jacob Wallace, Jason L. Schwartz and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham cautioned the data did not include individual causes of death or whether someone had been vaccinated. The data did not look at voters who had no party affiliation and was limited to Florida and Ohio, which aren’t neat comparisons to other states.
The study was utterly debunked here, only part of which I will comment on: the study did name matching and had a 65% hit rate. Speaking as a working data scientist at a large company, the very first rule of data analysis is to go by anything but names. Unique ID numbers are the only reliable method, especially for large datasets. (My friends are backing away from their devices in horror, praying as one, “Don’t let her start the datasets-collated-by-names-should-be-a-felony” rant, please.”)
Whatever this game-of-darts-disguised-as-a-study-was, even the Washington Post admits to the most glaring of its many weaknesses.
Sure wish the guy who wrote Lying had.
La-La Land Excursion #4: What if Sam’s Expert Has Schizophrenia?
In Episode #256, Sam discussed these things with Eric Topol. When discussing why it was that many well-qualified doctors disagreed with him and agreed with Bret and Heather, Sam’s explanation was that “we have a background level of schizophrenia in any human population of 1%.”
Sam ended his most recent podcast by reciting some numbers given to him by an expert from Johns Hopkins. He doesn’t go into any detail about this person’s qualifications, what role he or she played in collecting the data, why their data is any more reliable than anyone else’s, or give any reason to trust his recitation of their numbers over any other numbers.
Nor does he offer any assurance that his expert isn’t part of the 1% of schizophrenics in the baseline population. That’s facile, of course, but it’s his standard for a fair way to question the veracity of an expert who offers information that one doubts to be reliable.
He owes it to his audience to live up to his own avowed standard.
La-La Land Excursion #5: What’s A Little Myocarditis Among Friends?
Timestamp 1:09:29 “Anyway, my contact at Johns Hopkins informed me that the myocarditis that is a potential side effect of the mRNA vaccines is very different from other forms of myocarditis, in that there's generally no long term clinically significant consequence from it.”
This is a much more serious admission than he intended to make.
There are only two possibilities here.
One, the mRNA vaccines were known to cause myocarditis, and everyone in the public health apparatuses of our country who talked about it only when it became known as a clinically significant problem for healthy young men, well into the vaccination program, withheld this crucial information in violation of the Nuremberg Code and all medical ethics.
Two, there is no way to know that there are no long term consequences of clinical significance because “long term” isn’t a thing yet, and the expert lied. Sam in turn either failed to notice this really, really obvious problem, or he did notice it — and lied.
By the way, the CDC is refusing to release new information on myocarditis as a consequence of the mRNA shots. I wonder if this means it’s better or worse than we’ve been told?
Sam’s wealth (his minimum fee is 282% of the median US household income for live speeches) and privilege leave him well positioned to have it never occur to him to consider many things that are overwhelmingly obvious to others. For example, he has no need to worry about medical bills if he gives his teenagers myocarditis with their mRNA vaccines, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt there— clueless, not lying.
La-La Land Excursion #6: Sam Lying By Being A Weasel
In the course of defaming Bret Weinstein several times, one claim Sam makes is that Bret has done “hundreds” of podcasts on COVID.
Timestamp 21:47: I have not talked about COVID or vaccines or specific policies much at all. This criticism (of Sam) is coming in the cases of Bret and Joe from people who have literally done hundreds of podcasts on these topics.
Timestamp 46:51: I did just a few podcasts on COVID, and that's where I left it. Then I wasn't really paying attention. The way everyone who was worried about the vaccines was paying attention month after month after month. I certainly didn't listen to the hundred or more podcasts that Bret Weinstein did on the topic.
First, I have to say this: Heather is the co-host. Does she not exist? I’m deaf and I’m pretty damn sure that when my cyborg ears are turned on, I can hear a woman scientist talking into the microphone next to Bret’s. Why can’t Sam?
Bret and Heather have been doing one livestream a week, on average, since early in the pandemic. Those episodes often include Q&A with listener-submitted questions. Mostly, they focus on things that have happened since the last one. Their show fodder includes recent current events, scientific papers, political events, and other news.
The only way Sam could have arrived at this “literally hundreds of podcasts” construction is by counting each and every one of those episodes that Bret and Heather did that mentioned COVID in any sense, in any segment, even a question submitted during Q&A, as a podcast “about COVID.”
By this standard, every newspaper on earth has been writing solely “about COVID” each and every day for three and a half years. Pretty impressive that no journalism-related entities have talked about anything else in so long!
Notice also that Sam admits he stopped paying attention to COVID and related issues.
Really notice this, people. Sam’s criticism of Bret and Heather here is “Nuh uh! You’re the one committed to a narrative. Not me! I stopped paying attention!”
Sam, in his own defense of his own epistemology on COVID, asserts as a strength of his own arguments that he stopped paying attention.
His arguments about the “moving target” (his words) of COVID are the stronger ones, the ones that everyone should accept over Bret and Heather’s, because he… Stopped. Paying. Attention.
He then criticizes the people who didn’t—the people who kept up with papers as they were published, who followed the news, who updated their model continuously, admitted to everything they got wrong on the very next opportunity, and otherwise took in new information constantly.
And this criticism is offered as part of the reason why, in his judgment, he’s the one not invested in a narrow, unchanging view.
La-La Land Excursion #7: Sam Can’t Handle The Truth
Timestamp 53:16 “Even more, we have to trust institutions and the systems we have built to run them. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for improving our systems and institutions. I want whistleblowers at Boeing or Airbus to tell us what's wrong over there. I just don't want them doing it from seat 15A when we're at 30,000 feet. This is the crucial difference. Are we on the plane or are we in the airport lounge? This is the point of the analogy. In my view, the pandemic was very much like all of us getting on an airplane together, and it was not an uncomplicated flight. It was one of those flights where you're delayed for bad weather. You wind up sitting on the tarmac for hours. Some people on the plane want to get off because they're now scared. So the plane taxis back to the gate, losing its place in line and delaying the flight further for everyone. Now you have a choice about whether or not to get off. By analogy, this might be the question of whether you want to get the vaccine or not….”
Timestamp 56:04 “The moment that trust breaks down, the moment I'm asked to consider whether the pilot might be suicidal, the moment Jordan Peterson tells me that this particular airline has stopped to X-ray the luggage of Muslims, even if they come straight out of an Al Qaeda training camp because it's now considered a microaggression and everyone on the airline has gone woke, normal life becomes impossible. Throughout the pandemic, my goal was to help make normal life possible again and to not add to the cacophony of voices that were making that harder rather than easier.”
This tortured analogy for an airplane goes on for quite some time; I encourage you to read or listen to the whole thing.
Sam actually expects his audience to believe that if the airplane was already in the air, he wouldn’t want to know that there was a likely-fatal problem with it.
I have lost all faith in this man’s integrity, intellect, and rationality. But I have never found myself doubting he loves his family. I do not believe that if he was more likely to die than get off a plane, he thinks the moral choice would be for whistleblowers to remain silent and deny him the opportunity to call and let his daughters hear his voice telling them that Daddy loves them one last time.
I wonder how careful the airline industry would feel obligated to be—how long post-crash investigations would last, say—if cops went door to door forcing people to board planes? Or if private employers and governments colluded to make people who didn’t fly on experimental planes when they were told to, regardless of the risk, unemployable?
In my opinion, the fact that a profoundly gifted communicator couldn’t come up with a better metaphor than this says a lot about the extent to which he was trying to communicate honestly during this episode.
There were many more excursions into La-La Land, but I don’t want this essay to be longer than the episode transcript, so now, on to the main point.
Sam Is Wrong About Vaccine Mandates
The argument that I want to respond to was made in the context of Sam defending his recent Impact Theory appearance. Rather than play you that clip, I’ll skip it entirely and just print, and accept, his own assessment of what he meant.
Timestamp: 15:30 “Anyway, the clip that most people are reacting to of late was from the Impact Theory podcast, where I was talking to the host, Tom Bilyeu, a very nice guy whose audience also seems to hate me, who was claiming that where vaccines are concerned, bodily autonomy supersedes everything. On his account, you can never ethically force someone to get vaccinated. Therefore, vaccine mandates are always wrong. Now, I understand the intuition, but I simply pointed out that it was very likely unstable. The moment you dial up the dangerousness of the pathogen and the safety of the vaccine, whatever your concerns about bodily autonomy, at a certain point, the ethics flip, which is to say that it is quite easy to imagine a pathogen so dangerous, especially one that preferentially kills kids and a vaccine so safe and effective.
If you're worried about needles, just imagine it comes in a pill or a spray. The moment you imagine this, a virus that will kill tens of millions of kids, and we have a way to prevent this catastrophe that is truly benign, I think any sane person would want the government to force people to be vaccinated and to get their kids vaccinated. I was arguing on that podcast that if you don't believe that's true, if your gut tells you that it just can't be true, you are not thinking clearly enough about what the world would look like. In the presence of a pandemic, orders of magnitude more dangerous than COVID. And in the presence of vaccines, again, safe vaccines, that could truly stop the disease.”
For greater context, here is more that he said when referring to the clips of him going around most recently:
Timestamp 5:02 “People have edited videos to make it seem like I wish that more kids had died during the pandemic so that I could have been proven right about how scary COVID was or something like that.”
Timestamp 11:53 “…because people keep making clips to this effect and all you apparently watch are the clips. They are absurd and baffling because I'm not saying what you think I'm saying in those clips. Again, that is the purpose of the clip. But I should say that Bret, more than anyone, has supported and amplified the most malicious lies and trolls in this space.”
One of his loudest Twitter critics, Alexandros Marinos, is the person I suspect he’s referring to when he says clips have a “purpose” of making people think he’s saying things he isn’t saying, and that Bret is “supporting and amplifying” lies and trolls.
This is yet another lie. Alexandros cuts four and five minute clips to give context and links to originals. In fact, Alex gave him an extremely charitable reading on the Impact Theory appearance:
I wrote about his Impact Theory appearance, and did not think he was saying he wanted dead kids. I thought he was saying that rights are contingent on experts not deciding that we have a bad enough emergency to justify taking them away, or at least not today. I still think that’s what he was saying.
Before I discuss why he’s dead wrong, the dangers that absolutely flow from his position must be examined. His position has as an entirely logical consequence: the conclusion that rights come from data, specifically data as interpreted by unelected “experts” who can, at any time, interpret data to mean our rights no longer exist due to an emergency. We are supposed to live under the sword of Damocles, just waiting for overreach worse than the COVID overreach to happen at any time that experts decide, for reasons or incentives that we’re just supposed to trust are honorable, to announce an emergency.
Guess what? His paradigm is already being used.
New Mexico Took the Sam Harris Approach to Rights
Earlier this month, the governor of New Mexico used the guise of a “public health emergency” and the powers of the Public Health Emergency Response Act to suspend second amendment constitutional rights in the state, including of both open and concealed carry.
Under Sam Harris’s paradigm, she was correct to do so. She cited data from experts agreeing that a public health emergency was dire.
“If there’s an emergency — and I’ve declared an emergency for a temporary amount of time — I can invoke additional powers,” Grisham said. “No constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute.”
If Sam has a problem with this—thinks that, this time, the data and expertise used to justify this abridgement of rights is over the line—he’s obligated to say why, and to clarify exactly what procedures will be used to differentiate good, honorable motives from experts to remove our rights and bad, unjustified, dishonorable, overreaching motives from experts to remove our rights.
No, Airborne Ebola Would Not Justify Forced Vaccination
Yes, “forced vaccination” is in fact what Sam was referring to—his Impact Theory appearance (clip here, full appearance here) refers to “sending cops to vaccinate” people.
His thought experiment is bullshit—more on that in a minute—but for now I’m going to grant his absurd premises.
If the vaccine he describes actually works—is truly entirely effective—then vaccinating himself and his children solves his entire problem. In the magical world of entirely risk-free vaccines that do a perfect job of protecting recipients, a wondrous place where unintended consequences aren’t a thing, then the only thing anyone has any right to be concerned about is his own access to the miracle jab. He can line up to get himself and his children jabbed, and then the emergency is over for him. He and 100% of those whose healthcare decisions he has a right to control are now perfectly protected.
Second, under his described conditions, the only people who would refuse this hypothetical magical vaccine are either so stupid, so evil, or so far outside the realm of normal psychology that their voluntary suicide would be a net good. They should be allowed to forego this magical salvation-by-vaccine for the same reason that people should be allowed to eat at McDonald’s, drink to excess, and otherwise make unfortunate choices about their own bodies and health: their bodies, their choices. You have a magical, god-breathed piece of risk-free perfection available to take, so take it, be grateful, and stop talking.
Finally, the entire premise of “forced vaccination” is in contradiction with the premises, as well as betraying his contempt for his fellow Americans. The reason why vaccination has to be forced by parents onto children is that they lack the cognitive capacity to conclude that the MMR, for example, is in their best interest. Under the conditions he describes, it would make as much sense to send cops to force vaccination as it presently does to send them door to door to force people to eat food and drink liquids.
The Premises Are Utter Bullshit
He proposes a thought experiment with premises that are not only never true, they can never be true. We can never know that a vaccine is perfectly safe and effective. Even with long-term data, there is always real risk. In my short life, I have been in emergency rooms four times having rare and unusual reactions to drugs that are safe for most people. I have long made a habit of saying to my doctors and pharmacists, “What is the weirdest, most unusual side effect that only one person in all the clinical trials had, that they only put on the paperwork because they had to? I’m your zebra what’s gonna get that one, and I need to know what to expect.”
If his proposed circumstances came to fruition, if anything, we may need to force some people to not take it. In the event of unpredictable consequences, what humanity may need more than anything is a control group of people who hadn’t suffered the long-term damage that may be inevitable, but unpredictable as of the day we hand the cops injection kits to go with their sidearms and instructions to go around violating the Nuremberg Code.
This thought experiment also proposes, though Sam doesn’t admit this aspect of it explicitly, that we have institutions we can trust when they tell us that the disease is airborne Ebola and the vaccines are miraculously perfect, the world’s only medical intervention with absolutely no costs, trade-offs, side-effects, or unintended consequences.
This is more obviously absurd, post-COVID, than it was before COVID, but it was always an entirely ridiculous notion. The idea of institutions we can trust to remove our freedoms—especially bodily autonomy, the most precious human right of all, articulated so eloquently at Nuremberg—was always contradictory on its face. Institutions, including but not limited to government, have an inherent conflict of interest between the collective purpose that they were instituted for and the rights of the individual.
Sam may as well propose that a Taliban imam who is perfectly fair and totally objective be permitted to adjudicate in matters of dress codes, or that an entirely fair-minded, thoroughly reasonable fundamentalist pastor is the correct choice to order science and sex ed curricula for the public schools.
It’s flatly ridiculous, and further, he knows it’s flatly ridiculous.
The reason he wants people to concur with this hypothetical is of course opaque to his audience, and I suspect, even opaque to himself.
But the fact that he feels perfectly free to pick and choose when he trusts institutions to be free from political bias and when he doesn’t (he balks, in this Bill Maher episode, at getting boosted because the CDC has become, in his view, “politicized and inflexible”) suggests that he simply views himself as part of an elite group who would continue to make their own choices.
It’s the rest of us, we peasants and peons, who need the cops with guns to come do what Sam knows to be right for us.
The Next Pandemic WILL Be Worse
(Note: the link in this section goes to a graphic story of child abuse.)
Sam is correct about one thing—the next pandemic will be worse. It is very easy to predict that in the next pandemic, people will not take public health messaging or directives seriously, will balk at following stay-at-home orders, will pressure local officials to keep schools open no matter what.
I will certainly be an extreme skeptic next time, one who will be willing to go to almost any lengths to avoid novel medical interventions.
Why?
In my case, and that of many people I know in your audience…well….largely because of you, Sam.
Because you, and others who share your views (though you’re far and away the most eloquent spokesperson for your side’s views) have been quite clear in your belief that if experts interpret data to mean that freedom is just too dangerous under some circumstances, they should be believed first and questioned later—if questioned at all.
Because you continue to insist that the mistakes that decimated American small businesses, destroyed social fabrics that may never be fixed, and left kids who weren’t safe at home in the care of the people who made them unsafe, weren’t mistakes at all.
Because in your reckoning, anything a person could make a coherent argument for at the time is justified, and there is no need for accountability, no matter how seriously dire the (often predictable) consequences turn out to be.
Because you argued, and convinced many people with your arguments, that hiding a major news story just before an election was justified. Why? Because a bad orange man, who constituted a “once-in-a-lifetime moral emergency” in your judgment, might be helped by the story. A pandemic would be a much bigger emergency, so how could any declaration that Americans were getting accurate and complete data be trusted?
Because you want us to trust our institutions while arguing that a “once-in-a-lifetime moral emergency” constitutes a good reason to let them hide, withhold, and obfuscate.
Because of your self-serving, hypocritical, maddeningly inconsistent take that institutions must be trusted though untrustworthy.
COVID decimated my trust in institutions.
Your defense of those institutions, even now when so many of their failures are so obvious, is what has obliterated my ability to believe that our institutions can ever be made trustworthy again.
Principles are only principles if you still hold them when it’s hard.
Bodily autonomy is one of my principles.
If I have to die for it, well, okay.
About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
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As you once said, “Narcissism is a hell of drug.”
It’s truly baffling to me that Harris imagines that in a situation where there are millions of kids dying of a disease that a mandate would be necessary, that parents in that scenario would not be killing one another for the chance to have something that would save one of their children.
At the point where a mandate becomes “ethically necessary” the reality of the situation would be so inescapable that it would be like mandating breathing.