I swear, I went back and listened to that one segment seven or eight times. The man really and truly asserted that the fact that he stopped paying attention was a reason to trust his insight into COVID over that of people who paid attention all along. Just amazing.
I have a friend who simultaneously holds very strong opinions while proclaiming, somewhat proudly, that he doesn't pay any attention. I think these things are all linked to TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). I keep seeing the same pattern. People who believed the lies about Trump also believed the lies about Covid (too numerous to list), and the lies about Ukraine, and the lies about the climate. BTW - the first symptom of TDS is a compulsion to raise Trump's name even when it is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Watch for it. You'll see.
Yeah. But the word "positions" implies some measure of rational thought. From what I see it is more a form of schizophrenia - a disconnect from reality that transcends anything to do with Trump.
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.
That was a gratifying read. I marvel at how a person could go on multiple silent retreats, including ones that spanned 6 months, and be such an A-hole. I think back to the Four Horseman discussions where Sam starts talking about the need for secular spirituality. You can tell Hitchens thinks the idea is worthless. After Hitchens' passing Sam would mention "Hitch" as if he were a dear friend. Hitchens knew BS, and had he lived to see Covid-19, he would have deconstructed Sam Harris's pandemic musings in short order. I'm all for spirituality, but not from Harris. To think I sympathized over Dan Dennett's dismissal of Harris's free will scholarship. But Dan had Sam figured out all along.
Oct 4, 2023·edited Oct 4, 2023Liked by Holly MathNerd
As far as I am aware, every single human physical characteristic governed by genetics (height, for example) occurs along a normal Gaussian distribution.
Since every person is genetically unique, it would be the height of stupidity to expect every person to react in the same way to any given drug. Every single drug on the market has the potential for adverse reactions because of an organic chemistry concept known as stereochemistry.
Apologies in advance for the pedantism, but I think this is important for folks to understand.
Complex organic molecules (organic here only meaning "containing at least 1 carbon atom") often come in pairs, each a mirror image of the other. One half of that pair does the medical thing we want the drug to do, and the other, at best, is inert. But often times, it isn't inert, it is known to be potentially harmful. Drug companies go to great lengths and expense to remove the "bad" form of this pair, but it's largely impossible to get rid of it all.
Examples of this sort of stereochemisty abound in nature as well - this isn't unique to medicine. One in particular that comes to mind, the "right hand" version is an essential metabolite, and the "left hand" version is a toxic irritant. While they both have the exact same chemical formula, the individual molecules in each are arranged in such a way that each is a mirror image of the other. But the r-hand and l-hand versions *always* occur in a mixture, with no way to entirely eliminate the "bad" one from the mixture.
Consider the way people react to bee stings. For some, there is a bit of minor pain at the sting site, and for others, a full blown anaphylactic (allergic) reaction occurs, and left untreated will result in death. For most people, the reaction falls somewhere in between. Expressed in mathematical terms (the Gaussian distribution I mentioned earlier), roughly 2.5% of the population will have no reaction, and roughly 2.5% of the population will have an extreme reaction. The other 95% will react somewhere in between those extremes.
Complicating this is a concept where we say "the poison is in the dose." A couple teaspoons of table salt in your diet is normal and healthy for most people. But if you're stuck in a life raft at sea, desperately thirsty and drink a gallon of sea water, you're getting enough salt in a short enough period of time that you'll destroy your kidneys. Again, this sort of thing occurs along a continuum, but at some point, everyone will reach a toxic dose. For some chemicals, the toxic dose is very small, measured in parts per million. For others like salt, it takes quite a lot to reach the toxic dose.
It is a certainty Sam is aware of all this. His lies are utterly monstrous.
Thanks very much for explaining all this so clearly. And yes, I agree that he knows he's full of shit, which makes this whole saga far more distasteful.
You may already have this on your roadmap for the "I'm not a math person" topic, but if you don't (and given your skill at teaching), I think some elementary statistics related to normal distributions, SD and all that is a worthy topic. Sadly, the only thing about statistics most people seem to remember is Mark Twain's quote. Modeling on large data sets can be tough. Understanding the results doesn't have to be.
I have been a fan of Sam Harris since his podcast "Making Sense" had just started as "Waking Up" (and the meditation app didn't yet exist). I have been reluctant to hear this latest episode with Sam's clarifying remarks, because the effort required to decipher these arguments might drain me while shredding the remaining respect I have for him. I was delighted to find your blog post today. Your post is excellently written, skillfully argued, and I found your statements of personal conflict of interest and personal experience with the medical system to be honorable. Objectively, it's a solid article, but it's also a good role model for online communication even if 100% of your arguments were debunked (and I'm doubtful they can). Keep up the good work. 👍
Thank you! I was a fan going back a long time and did my damnedest to remain so, but either he's not the man he used to be or I've grown enough that he appears not to be the man he used to be. Probably a bit of both, frankly.
Oct 4, 2023·edited Oct 4, 2023Liked by Holly MathNerd
Here's Harris in the first paragraph following timestamp 47:03 of the linked transcript:
"But despite how many errors we made, I trust the mainstream consensus on most questions about COVID and vaccines, at least to a first approximation, which is how I approach another very polarizing topic, climate change. There are a few caveats here, but I believe that the mainstream picture of COVID is far more likely to be correct than the fringe picture pushed ad nauseam by many people in alternative media."
1) We're three and half years out from the beginning of the pandemic. The "mainstream consensus on most questions about COVID and vaccines" (I assume that by "vaccines" he's referring specifically to COVID vaccines) has been proven wrong on every axis that I can think of. How much more wrong would his exalted experts have to be before he stops trusting the "mainstream consensus"?
2) Via reporting on the Twitter files from Taibbi, Shellenberger, et al., we know that dozens of federal government agencies were demanding Twitter censor & remove material from dissenters, whether experts like Kulldorff and Bhattacharya or folks like Berenson, el gato malo, etc. who simply observed true things revealed in official COVID data until governments worldwide stopped publishing that data because it so obviously undermined their stated positions. It's logical to assume those agencies were also compelling censorship from Google & its pet video platform Youtube, Facebook, etc. Which means the "mainstream consensus" was a manufactured farce. When the powerful have the means to silence challengers, they can make any position look like it has unanimous agreement.
3) Harris pretends that the government bureaucrats funding experts' research, the universities housing those experts, and the experts themselves are all neutral & objective, untainted by ideology or perverse incentives, selflessly toiling in the public interest. Not like those self-centered, far-right "fringe" characters on "alternative media" who use motivated reasoning and cherrypicked studies & data to justify their freedom to kill innocent grandmothers with their uncovered faces and vaccine denial.
That last point is a common form of elitism among his cohort of educated, highly conformist midwits. That snobbery, that pathologically desperate need to never be perceived as an unwashed Walmart shopper or, God forbid, a Trump voter, is also how you get self-styled elites claiming (and eventually actually believing) that men can become women just by declaring it, or that it's a good idea to call women "birthing people," or that unarmed African-Americans walk around in perpetual imminent danger of being gunned down for no reason by homicidal racist white police officers.
I appreciate the "conflict of interest" statement. While I don't know Dr. Heying or Weinstein personally, they do seem to be incredibly honest and humble people from the outside.
I doubt he'll face it or address it at all. I'd like to be surprised. And thanks -- I wouldn't write about matters touching Heather and Bret if I were doing journalism here, but this is just where I blather and have the incredible good fortune of having found some people who enjoy reading it. Still, it seemed important to clarify that I have a definite bias, both emotional (I love them) but also cognitive (I do in fact know a lot more than Sam Harris or nearly anyone else about how they handle these matters.)
Liars are not profoundly gifted communicators, they are just liars. A PhD in Neuroscience for a philosophy paper? The pillock isn't actually qualified in anything at all then. The good bits of philosophy leave it behind and become sciences; what is left is mostly junk picking of fluff from one's navel. I stopped listening to or reading Harris a long time before the Kung Flu. Others' work in his supposed Wheelhouse always had more depth; he was clothes-stealing and the level of sketch woo-meister. Thanks for the effort though.
As you once said, “Narcissism is a hell of drug.”
I swear, I went back and listened to that one segment seven or eight times. The man really and truly asserted that the fact that he stopped paying attention was a reason to trust his insight into COVID over that of people who paid attention all along. Just amazing.
He paid just enough attention to be the voice of God, but not enough to be a conspiracy theorist like those bastards Bret and Joe. Got it, Sam.
I have a friend who simultaneously holds very strong opinions while proclaiming, somewhat proudly, that he doesn't pay any attention. I think these things are all linked to TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). I keep seeing the same pattern. People who believed the lies about Trump also believed the lies about Covid (too numerous to list), and the lies about Ukraine, and the lies about the climate. BTW - the first symptom of TDS is a compulsion to raise Trump's name even when it is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Watch for it. You'll see.
Trump broke a lot of people’s minds.
That says infinitely more about their positions than Trump’s abilities.
Yeah. But the word "positions" implies some measure of rational thought. From what I see it is more a form of schizophrenia - a disconnect from reality that transcends anything to do with Trump.
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.
He really does regard other people as utterly and entirely incapable of doing anything sensible of their own volition.
It’s the only scenario where he isn’t a pompous, hypocritical ass. His worldview *requires* that to be the case.
That was a gratifying read. I marvel at how a person could go on multiple silent retreats, including ones that spanned 6 months, and be such an A-hole. I think back to the Four Horseman discussions where Sam starts talking about the need for secular spirituality. You can tell Hitchens thinks the idea is worthless. After Hitchens' passing Sam would mention "Hitch" as if he were a dear friend. Hitchens knew BS, and had he lived to see Covid-19, he would have deconstructed Sam Harris's pandemic musings in short order. I'm all for spirituality, but not from Harris. To think I sympathized over Dan Dennett's dismissal of Harris's free will scholarship. But Dan had Sam figured out all along.
Truly a delight to read.
Thanks. I'm angry at the version of myself who idolized him but it helps to write about it. Writing out all the arguments is very clarifying.
As far as I am aware, every single human physical characteristic governed by genetics (height, for example) occurs along a normal Gaussian distribution.
Since every person is genetically unique, it would be the height of stupidity to expect every person to react in the same way to any given drug. Every single drug on the market has the potential for adverse reactions because of an organic chemistry concept known as stereochemistry.
Apologies in advance for the pedantism, but I think this is important for folks to understand.
Complex organic molecules (organic here only meaning "containing at least 1 carbon atom") often come in pairs, each a mirror image of the other. One half of that pair does the medical thing we want the drug to do, and the other, at best, is inert. But often times, it isn't inert, it is known to be potentially harmful. Drug companies go to great lengths and expense to remove the "bad" form of this pair, but it's largely impossible to get rid of it all.
Examples of this sort of stereochemisty abound in nature as well - this isn't unique to medicine. One in particular that comes to mind, the "right hand" version is an essential metabolite, and the "left hand" version is a toxic irritant. While they both have the exact same chemical formula, the individual molecules in each are arranged in such a way that each is a mirror image of the other. But the r-hand and l-hand versions *always* occur in a mixture, with no way to entirely eliminate the "bad" one from the mixture.
Consider the way people react to bee stings. For some, there is a bit of minor pain at the sting site, and for others, a full blown anaphylactic (allergic) reaction occurs, and left untreated will result in death. For most people, the reaction falls somewhere in between. Expressed in mathematical terms (the Gaussian distribution I mentioned earlier), roughly 2.5% of the population will have no reaction, and roughly 2.5% of the population will have an extreme reaction. The other 95% will react somewhere in between those extremes.
Complicating this is a concept where we say "the poison is in the dose." A couple teaspoons of table salt in your diet is normal and healthy for most people. But if you're stuck in a life raft at sea, desperately thirsty and drink a gallon of sea water, you're getting enough salt in a short enough period of time that you'll destroy your kidneys. Again, this sort of thing occurs along a continuum, but at some point, everyone will reach a toxic dose. For some chemicals, the toxic dose is very small, measured in parts per million. For others like salt, it takes quite a lot to reach the toxic dose.
It is a certainty Sam is aware of all this. His lies are utterly monstrous.
Thanks very much for explaining all this so clearly. And yes, I agree that he knows he's full of shit, which makes this whole saga far more distasteful.
You may already have this on your roadmap for the "I'm not a math person" topic, but if you don't (and given your skill at teaching), I think some elementary statistics related to normal distributions, SD and all that is a worthy topic. Sadly, the only thing about statistics most people seem to remember is Mark Twain's quote. Modeling on large data sets can be tough. Understanding the results doesn't have to be.
Stereochemistry is a wondrous word; thank you for introducing me to it and to the concept.
Holly, you knocked it out of the park with this analysis.
Thank you, and thanks for reading! :-)
I have been a fan of Sam Harris since his podcast "Making Sense" had just started as "Waking Up" (and the meditation app didn't yet exist). I have been reluctant to hear this latest episode with Sam's clarifying remarks, because the effort required to decipher these arguments might drain me while shredding the remaining respect I have for him. I was delighted to find your blog post today. Your post is excellently written, skillfully argued, and I found your statements of personal conflict of interest and personal experience with the medical system to be honorable. Objectively, it's a solid article, but it's also a good role model for online communication even if 100% of your arguments were debunked (and I'm doubtful they can). Keep up the good work. 👍
Thank you! I was a fan going back a long time and did my damnedest to remain so, but either he's not the man he used to be or I've grown enough that he appears not to be the man he used to be. Probably a bit of both, frankly.
Here's Harris in the first paragraph following timestamp 47:03 of the linked transcript:
"But despite how many errors we made, I trust the mainstream consensus on most questions about COVID and vaccines, at least to a first approximation, which is how I approach another very polarizing topic, climate change. There are a few caveats here, but I believe that the mainstream picture of COVID is far more likely to be correct than the fringe picture pushed ad nauseam by many people in alternative media."
1) We're three and half years out from the beginning of the pandemic. The "mainstream consensus on most questions about COVID and vaccines" (I assume that by "vaccines" he's referring specifically to COVID vaccines) has been proven wrong on every axis that I can think of. How much more wrong would his exalted experts have to be before he stops trusting the "mainstream consensus"?
2) Via reporting on the Twitter files from Taibbi, Shellenberger, et al., we know that dozens of federal government agencies were demanding Twitter censor & remove material from dissenters, whether experts like Kulldorff and Bhattacharya or folks like Berenson, el gato malo, etc. who simply observed true things revealed in official COVID data until governments worldwide stopped publishing that data because it so obviously undermined their stated positions. It's logical to assume those agencies were also compelling censorship from Google & its pet video platform Youtube, Facebook, etc. Which means the "mainstream consensus" was a manufactured farce. When the powerful have the means to silence challengers, they can make any position look like it has unanimous agreement.
3) Harris pretends that the government bureaucrats funding experts' research, the universities housing those experts, and the experts themselves are all neutral & objective, untainted by ideology or perverse incentives, selflessly toiling in the public interest. Not like those self-centered, far-right "fringe" characters on "alternative media" who use motivated reasoning and cherrypicked studies & data to justify their freedom to kill innocent grandmothers with their uncovered faces and vaccine denial.
That last point is a common form of elitism among his cohort of educated, highly conformist midwits. That snobbery, that pathologically desperate need to never be perceived as an unwashed Walmart shopper or, God forbid, a Trump voter, is also how you get self-styled elites claiming (and eventually actually believing) that men can become women just by declaring it, or that it's a good idea to call women "birthing people," or that unarmed African-Americans walk around in perpetual imminent danger of being gunned down for no reason by homicidal racist white police officers.
I wonder if Harris will have another "Kids in the basement" moment over the CDC's latest atrocity?
https://public.substack.com/p/cdc-covered-up-covid-vaccine-myocarditis
I appreciate the "conflict of interest" statement. While I don't know Dr. Heying or Weinstein personally, they do seem to be incredibly honest and humble people from the outside.
I doubt he'll face it or address it at all. I'd like to be surprised. And thanks -- I wouldn't write about matters touching Heather and Bret if I were doing journalism here, but this is just where I blather and have the incredible good fortune of having found some people who enjoy reading it. Still, it seemed important to clarify that I have a definite bias, both emotional (I love them) but also cognitive (I do in fact know a lot more than Sam Harris or nearly anyone else about how they handle these matters.)
Liars are not profoundly gifted communicators, they are just liars. A PhD in Neuroscience for a philosophy paper? The pillock isn't actually qualified in anything at all then. The good bits of philosophy leave it behind and become sciences; what is left is mostly junk picking of fluff from one's navel. I stopped listening to or reading Harris a long time before the Kung Flu. Others' work in his supposed Wheelhouse always had more depth; he was clothes-stealing and the level of sketch woo-meister. Thanks for the effort though.