Sam Harris vs. Scott Adams on Trump... first time Harris gets triggered

Most "celebrity thinkers" are what they are because they're dumb enough for mass appeal but formally credentialed and well-dressed enough to make it taste good.

If he was exceptionally intelligent (in this context) he would have to keep his ideas a secret, not sell them with his own branded yoga program.
 
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I've been catching up on Harris' podcast while working for the last week or so. He tends to be a bit of a pedantic host but he's had some good guests, and the best episodes are easily the ones where he gets rustled.

Will bump this one to the top of the list.
 
AviatorShades said:
Most "celebrity thinkers" are what they are because they're dumb enough for mass appeal but formally credentialed and well-dressed enough to make it taste good.

If he was exceptionally intelligent he would have to keep his ideas a secret, not market them with a branded yoga program.
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Then he'd be criticized as an ivory tower pinhead.

Seems like a no-win scenario for the actual intellectuals of the world. Imagine that.
 
Caveat said:
Then he'd be criticized as an ivory tower pinhead.

Seems like a no-win scenario for the actual intellectuals of the world. Imagine that.
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Ivory tower pinheads are often the same guys. They need "marketable" ideas to secure research grants. Few people are paid to think and many are paid to reaffirm society's preexisting and convenient conclusions.

I'm not questioning his innate intelligence but I definitely feel like like he's dedicated more to brand maintenance than hard "thinking" these days. Richard Dawkins being the ultimate example of a once bright scientist, turned blowhard pundit, turned shameless T-shirt salesman.
 
JonesBones said:
They have polls where they rate the greatest intellectual alive. Dawkins has been in the top 10 many times. Maybe even won it. Harris is never there. Harris is smarter than Dawkins too.


Look at this garbage:

When Prospect magazine listed Britain's leading public intellectuals in 2004 and invited readers' votes, it was Richard Dawkins who emerged as No 1.

Joining him in the top 10 are the psychologists Steven Pinker (3) and Daniel Kahneman (10), the economists Paul Krugman (5) and Amartya Sen (7) and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (6), who all, like him, figured in the magazine's first list of world-class thinkers in 2005.


Dawkins was above Peter Higgs. lol.
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Zizek, Krugman, Sen, Dawkins. Is this a left leaning magazine? I cannot listen to Zizek slobber through his incoherent sentences.
 
30mins in and nothing of value was said by Scott Adams
 
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WorldofWarcraft said:
So this is Scott Adams' girlfriend

11315610_5-minutes-with-instagram-sensation-kristina_t1b8d8501.jpg
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Fawlty said:
I think this dilbert fella is a little too in love with playing mind games to excuse horrible shit. He likes to offer unlikely alternatives to long strings of clearly unethical things, and then sits back smugly as if he has actually refuted something, or even presented something close to a likely case. Basically, he's a con man who admires a con man. It was a good listen, and Harris was definitely rustled by Adams' tactics- rather than his substance- at a couple points, but overall made far better arguments on every topic. And Adams was embarrassingly out of his depth on climate change.
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This is what I got out of it too.

He gave his best case scenario to Everything crazy Trump have said, the best part is when he said that Harris can't know what Trump is thinking and that is one way to see when someone have conformation bias. But Scott Adams himself tells Sam all the time in this discussion what Trump is actually thinking and what his motives actually are.

And why can't Trump do his stick without dividing the country if Trump is such a genius that he claims.?

In the end he's not saying anything only speculating, it seems to me he gets off defending a con man.
 
I listened to about half of this recording this morning.

I found it odd how Adams said he doesn't like analogies and a lot of the discussion was about Harris bringing up the analogy that Adams wrote about how people are viewing events in two theaters.

Everything fit neatly into Adams argument. But he likes that we are talking about confirmation bias. He doesn't seem to think he may have any?

Basically it came down to Adams saying look at the scoreboard. Trump won. He is great at connecting with people and getting them to vote for him to win. Harris saying but he lies constantly and is unethical at business. Adams saying scoreboard. Harris saying he is unethical in his private life. Adams saying scoreboard. See he can pay a small price for the lies and all but he still won. And let me pat myself on the back for predicting he would win.

Maybe they mention it later but there was nothing about how lucky Trump was to run against Hillary who many people would have voted for anyone but her.

I thought the Charles Murray discussion with Harris on Trump was more insightful than this one. Murray said people voted for Trump as a murder weapon against the far left. They may not like him but they wanted to be heard and the left was off on their own world.
 


Sam Harris tries to debate for 2 hours and gets completely and utterly shut down and changing direction of his points by someone with an opposing view. Sam Harris reminds me of a few posters here, tries to use logic and reason in their crusade against Trump without realizing that they are not accurately using logic or reason to position themselves.
 
Madmick said:
This country needs way, way, way more Sam Harris, and way, way, way less Trump.

Scott Adams is way too in love with NLP. Trump didn't build it, you dope.
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Reminder Sam Harris got smoked. We need more losers?
 
dontsnitch said:
Suddenly his claims of persuasion and hypnosis don't seem as absurd.
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So she's an aspiring model with two kids. He's very rich, semi-famous, kind of funny sometimes, in reasonably decent shape, and knows the secrets of NLP. I'm guessing that last item on the list isn't the key factor in their connection.
 
JonesBones said:
They have polls where they rate the greatest intellectual alive. Dawkins has been in the top 10 many times. Maybe even won it. Harris is never there. Harris is smarter than Dawkins too.


Look at this garbage:

When Prospect magazine listed Britain's leading public intellectuals in 2004 and invited readers' votes, it was Richard Dawkins who emerged as No 1.

Joining him in the top 10 are the psychologists Steven Pinker (3) and Daniel Kahneman (10), the economists Paul Krugman (5) and Amartya Sen (7) and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (6), who all, like him, figured in the magazine's first list of world-class thinkers in 2005.


Dawkins was above Peter Higgs. lol.
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17 year olds read the god delusion and are convinced dawkins is the smartest man in the universe

hes definitely a babby's first intellectual
 
Pwent said:
17 year olds read the god delusion and are convinced dawkins is the smartest man in the universe

hes definitely a babby's first intellectual
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The selfish gene is a pretty good book.

I don't get the Dawkins hate, the guy is almost 80 why wouldn't he be content with giving paid rehashed speeches and wrecking morons on twitter? He's enjoying his retirement.
 
The ScorpioN said:
The selfish gene is a pretty good book.

I don't get the Dawkins hate, the guy is almost 80 why wouldn't he be content with giving paid rehashed speeches and wrecking morons on twitter? He's enjoying his retirement.
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Did he enjoy being disinvited at Berkeley to sell his book?

The best-selling author had been due to address an event hosted by KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California, in August.

Organisers accused him of "abusive speech against Islam" when scrapping his appearance, but he argues his criticism was not directed at Islam.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40710165


This is funny because I think it was Dennet or Harris who said he needs to get off twitter and he is destroying his reputation.

“He could be seriously damaging his long-term legacy,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett said of Dawkins’s public skirmishes. It is a legacy, Dennett believes, that should reflect the “masterpiece” that was The Selfish Gene and Dawkins’s major contribution to our understanding of life. As for Twitter: “I wish he wouldn’t do it,” Krauss said. “I told him that.”

Peter Higgs, a real scientist, called Dawkins an "embarrassment". EO Wilson called him a journalist. Dawkins is not a scientist.


Wilson answered: “There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he’s a journalist, and journalists are people that report what the scientists have found and the arguments I’ve had have actually been with scientists doing research.”

“What else is he? I mean journalism is a high and influential profession. But he’s not a scientist, he’s never done scientific research. My definition of a scientist is that you can complete the following sentence: ‘he or she has shown that…’,” Wilson says.
 
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The ScorpioN said:
The selfish gene is a pretty good book.

I don't get the Dawkins hate, the guy is almost 80 why wouldn't he be content with giving paid rehashed speeches and wrecking morons on twitter? He's enjoying his retirement.
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His personality is a little off-putting, that may be why people don't like him. He comes off as dismissive, IMO, but I agree the selfish gene, the only book of his I've read, was great.

I used to listen to his religious debates, always enjoyed those, but even there he's a little smug. But all that aside, I enjoy him. He reminds me of a kid, in a good way.
 
The ScorpioN said:
The selfish gene is a pretty good book.

I don't get the Dawkins hate, the guy is almost 80 why wouldn't he be content with giving paid rehashed speeches and wrecking morons on twitter? He's enjoying his retirement.
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just saying he isnt the #1 smartest intellectual alive or whatever award he won
 
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