Someone please collapse the waveform! Marek Sullivan explains how Sam Harris gets away with it: he simply says many contradictory things that can’t possibly all be true, so that when he’s accused of being a right-wing neo-con he can just point to some paragraph or disclaimer that makes no sense relative to the sense of his essay, and presto! He’s shown that you’ve misinterpreted him!
It’s a good trick. Too bad so many atheists have been gulled by it.
Technical note. Sullivan did misquote him. Harris was using Carson not Cruz for the example.
I listened to the whole podcast, and I was sort of shocked by the statement as well, but I thought it was a bit tongue in cheek.
It was Sam’s laughing at Trans jokes much later that really bothered me.
Good, except “quantum superimposition” is wrong; there is no “imp” in quantum superposition. Maybe I’m missing a deliberate pun . . .
That does seem to be a pretty good analysis about why Harris can be so frustrating and widely ‘misquoted’.
“superimposition” is what Sullivan is doing to the poor overused cat.
That’s funny – famous atheist Harris taking a page from the biblical playbook.
harris – verb
1. To preemptively insert language so as to be defensibly quote mined by supporters in response to accusations of bigotry. “Right wing columnists like to harris their columns so they don’t lose access to main stream papers.”
One quibble. He means classical propositional logic. No idea wtf philosophical logic is other than a subfield of philosophy.
So a Gish-gallop of bafflegab?
Let me show you my “surprised” face:
:/
He is not only in two places at once, he is tendentious in both places. The Bible, of course, is just as full of violence as the Koran and even more dehumanizing of the non-chosen people. There are indeed Christian terrorists, and Christians who right now are calling for the murder of homosexuals and a civilizational war against Islam. And, while it is true that there is right now a violent movement within Islam that is causing a lot of trouble, Christian terrorists currently somewhat less (though far from non-zero), conflating it with all of Islam is highly counterproductive.
Came to say basically this. Now we can argue about whether the awful thing has to be read “in context”. Or maybe it’s just a metaphor. *eyeroll*
There is this famous Dutch writer who wrote a bulky book about how two contradictory propositions can in fact both be true.
In the hundreds of pages, there was not a single example.
For fuck’s sake, no, following Einstein’s lead, he was pointing out that this was an obvious problem with the orthodox interpretation. He was saying it was “bonkers,” in other words, not telling us that. If you thought you could somehow get away with that nonsense with particles or waves or whatever you want there to be, try it with something made of those things, like a cat. Then, there is abundant evidence all over the place that reality simply doesn’t work that way. I just can’t stand this revisionist history according to which it was his terrible idea, when Bohr et al were really the ones responsible for peddling it. You don’t need to know much of anything about QM, to avoid fabrications like this or just to keep the names straight. Gah…. haven’t moved on yet, but I don’t know if I care that there’s more shit to say about Harris.
I sometimes feel like listening to Sam Harris talk is like looking at that picture of the blue and black/white and gold dress. Half the audience hears one thing, the other half hears something completely different.
A decent analogy. Half is looking at HOW he says something, the smarter half is looking at the EFFECT of what he says, and ignores the backtracking due to the lack of “I’M SORRY, I WAS WRONG”.
Nerd of Redhead, the problem is that both halves think they’re the smarter half :)
In the back and forth with one proponent of the pseudoscience I most often critique, he did that constantly. Most pseudoscience – maybe all – draws on the same few logical fallacies. This includes Harris’.
consciousness razor @12: Yeah, Schrodinger was trying to point out a perceived problem with quantum superpositions.
Then stop passing on revisionist history yourself. Bohr wasn’t “peddling” anything of the sort. The idea that the cat is “dead and alive at the same time”, or that nothing happens until “someone looks” is as unjustly applied to Bohr as the cat as a serious idea is applied to Schrodinger. It was Heisenberg who, much later, gave a privileged position to the observer.
Indeed not.
From the OP:
This guy clearly thinks his readership and critics are none too bright. It’s as if he expects folks to ignore context and gloss over any type of nuance. Presumably this is done to bolster some preconceived narrative and unfortunately a certain audience eats this stuff up like it’s candy.
Fortunately the Internet never forgets and the “misrepresentations” can be archived checked and debunked or verified as the case may be. The contradictory bafflegab can be dissected and shown for what it is.
sw @13,
Nice analogy very apt. Here’s another for grins. Harris is the embodiment of the spinning dancer or silhouette illusion which is a kinetic optical illusion that some folks perceive as spinning clockwise and some folks anticlockwise. Some even perceive it spinning one way one moment and the other the next…
Harris’s words can be made to be spinning this way or that way depending on what’s most convenient at the moment and some folks will earnestly perceive it that way.
I guess we’ve lost the tomatoes, eh?
siderail:
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (H.U.P.) was the subject Schrodinger was trying to refute with his Cat Paradox. I read it as an argument for “hidden variable” (which Bell later disproved). Meaning: , the paradox asks.
Great example of how Science works to clarify confusing aspects of recently introduced Theories [NB capitalization]. Take the confusing bit, construct an example from that part of the theory and ask for clarification. [what I’m trying to do here]
Real problem is when someone tries to use that as rationalization to say two contradictory things and claim they are both true and both false, simultaneously (as Harris seems to be doing).
It doesn’t matter what Harris’s defenders think. They lose the argument, because evidence based science almost invariably defeats philosophy based on fear and paranoia.
I don’t understand why we need to bring in Quantum Superposition and Collapsing Waveforms and all that other complicated mathy stuff.
All of the Harris quotes that were cited are just variations on, “I’m not a racist, but…” Those can be described perfectly well using Classical Mechanics. I’d need to look it up but I’m pretty sure you can derive them directly from Newton’s Third Law.
Rob Grigjanis:
Well, he certainly wasn’t clear about it. Maybe you’d say Bohr’s position was “not saying what happens” until there’s a “collapse,” since there is no reality to speak of at the quantum level … as opposed to saying nothing happens. Does that do it justice, and if there is any way to make sense of that, what’s supposed to be the difference?
Indeed, Heisenberg was included in my “et al.” My impression has always been that Bohr was the ringleader — there is a fairly obvious reason why it’s often called the “Copenhagen interpretation” after all — but of course they could all think for themselves. Also, notice that I didn’t mention anything about “observers,” which did come a bit later and added yet another layer of confusion.
slithey tove:
It was in response to EPR, which itself wasn’t trying to refute the uncertainty principle. This is not what any of them were trying to do.
Local “hidden variable” theories were disproven, not all of them categorically.
Just to be clear, Bell was a big proponent of de Broglie-Bohm, a nonlocal “hidden variables” theory, which he thought was a much better approach compared to the standard ones. Whether or not you like that kind of theory, it’s very misleading to tell people essentially that he disproved his own idea, which he continued to hold after the proof in question, because that isn’t at all what happened.
cr @23:
Yes he was. He talked about the interaction between object and measuring apparatus. For him, the state of the cat was determined before the box was opened, because the process mediating quantum state and classical outcome was inside the box. You said he was peddling the picture Schrodinger gave. He wasn’t.
Hm, maybe try harder to keep the names straight?
It’s not about you, but about what Schrodinger wrote, right?
To Bohr, there was no “macroscopic indeterminacy”.
cr @23:
The abstract of the EPR paper (my bolding);
The bolded bit is the uncertainty principle.
See also the section of the link I gave in #25.
One more try (keep getting Website offline when I click ‘Post Comment’)
#26: Should be “From the abstract of the EPR paper”. Link.
It’s completely irrelevant whether if it’s before or after the box is opened, or if it’s inside or outside of the box. This “process” you’re describing is just an elliptical way of speaking about a collapse due to a measurement. If you don’t like those words then pick others. His view was nevertheless that there was nothing to say about it until “the process” is over, wherever and whenever and however that occurs. It wasn’t just a matter of being unwilling to say what was going on because he didn’t know. He was rejecting realism at the quantum level, because he thought that somehow or another concepts like that only applied at macroscopic scales, which is to say big objects like observers or measuring instruments. I’m not going to spend time hunting down translated quotes to that effect, but he said as much. So you’re either ignorant of that, or I have no clue what your complaint is supposed to be about.
If the uncertainty principle describes epistemic states, then EPR gave no refutation of it. But indeed they did mention it in their paper, which is not the same as refuting it. They wanted to show QM was incomplete, not that the UP was wrong, and they even went to the trouble of giving an argument and explaining it very clearly, if you bother to read anything in the paper except for a sentence from the abstract which doesn’t even say what you’re implying about it. The title of the fucking paper alludes to lemma (1) with its rhetorical question, and their conclusion tells you again what they think their paper shows. The contents in the middle should also give you some clues as to what the paper actually does. EPR believed (wrongly, as Bell later indicated) that the hypothetical system couldn’t be disturbed in the situation described, since they implicitly assumed locality. Bell showed that, given some extremely reasonable assumptions, QM (or any theory that will do the job) isn’t local as EPR had thought. So, you don’t get to assume that you’re not disturbing the particles, as a way of determining what’s an element of reality and whether the theory describes all of those, merely because they’re spacelike separated. And that certainly has fuck-all to do with refuting Heisenberg.
Now you know why you simply cannot
walk into Mordorqupte Harris in context…1) Say a considered, sensible thing in the intro
2) Proceed to say outrageous shit completely at odds with the sensible and cautious statement
3) Retreat to the sensible bit to say you have him all wrong
4) resume the outrageous shit again, but this time with vast amounts of dissembling.
I’m a little concerned by the paucity of Harrisites on this thread. Has some sort of aquatic ecological disaster befallen Vulcan? I shudder to think of the magnitude of such a crisis needed to crash the Sealion population of *that* place….
cr @28:
It’s completely relevant to Schrodinger’s point, which was the absurdity of “macroscopic indeterminacy”. For Bohr, the indeterminacy ends at detection (or not) in the box before it’s opened, not in the “collapse” of a “cat wavefunction” when it is opened, so Schrodinger posed no problem for him, and he wasn’t “peddling” what you say he was. You’re transforming Schrodinger’s rather narrow point into your own pet cause.
Also, I don’t think Bohr ever invoked collapse. Not that I’ve seen, and this article agrees.
Yep. I can only conclude that the lateness of the hour had me reading you as saying that the paper had nothing to do with the UP, which was obviously and spectacularly wrong.
Other faults of Sam Harris’ argumentation:
He is prone to black and white thinking, even on issues that are full of gray or even technicolor.
He tends towards thought experiments on issues for which there is already a plentitude of empirical data, and his thought experiments are sometimes based on faulty premises.
He accuses those who disagree with him of disingenuousness. Because after all, how could any intelligent person actually disagree with Harris’ impeccable logic?
What the heck, I’m bored this morning. I’ll stick up for Harris a little. I’m not actually sure why anybody considers him worth listening to on political matters, as neither his qualifications nor any of his statements on the subject establish him as much of an authority or deep thinker, but he is criticized unfairly, including here. The point is that he says things that are contradictory. Examples.
1. Registering all American Muslims, closing mosques, or admitting only Christian immigrants are bad, silly ideas.
2. It makes sense to prefer Christians over Muslims in immigration.
Contradictory? Well, if you think “admit only Christians” and “prefer Christians” are identical. I think that means you either flunk reading comprehension, are determined to read Harris ungenerously, or are unable to conceive of ways in which Christian immigrants might be preferred without excluding all other religions completely.
Shall we try another? These are almost verbatim from the cited article.
1. States organized around a religion, such as Israel should not exist.
2. If, however, a state organized around a religion were established, it makes sense for it to be organized around a religion that is constantly fleeing persecution.
Contradiction? Or an admission that reasonable people might disagree with him on point 1, and that in that case, the ethical argument for a Jewish state is as good as for any religion-centered state?
Preference of one and elimination of the other are not identical in this context, but they are both discrimination. I don’t think people are on his case for being contradictory for that, just the logic of “I’m less shitty than X, thus I’m reasonable.”
Or, y’know, we could just stop treating Jewish people like shit. Also, don’t you think that point #2 is a good one, since any state established around one religion puts others at risk of persecution?
As for Sam being self-contradictory, search “Anti-Profiling” and tell me that isn’t just a rephrasing of the same old horseshit.
k5083: “are determined to read Harris ungenerously”
And that pretty much defines PZ.
Not a single one of the supposed “contradictions” in the cited article is *actually* a contradiction. Utter nonsense.
Oh, i agree.
So if they aren’t a contradiction and it is just picking the world’s most pointless nit, what the fuck is the point, exactly? Is he making any actual point or is he wasting everybody’s time saying absolutely fucking nothing fpr no fucking reason whatsoever. Which is it?
That’s a good question. I’m mystified why people react so strongly to Harris, either pro or con. His critique of religion is sensible and articulate but let’s face it, of the Fab Four Horsemen, he’s Ringo.
And then some things he does bug me that even his critics don’t take issue with. Shouldn’t someone call him out for letting himself be called a neuroscientist all the time? He has the Ph.D., but AFAIK he has never earned a living as a neuroscientist, has no academic appointment or publication record other than a popular layman’s book on free will. He’s a neuroscientist in the same sense that those creationist biology Ph.Ds are biologists. Also, everyone politely ignores his book on meditation, which is full of the same fuzzy thinking he attacks in religious apologists. On politics, he’s overmatched by the likes of Chomsky even if, like me, you happen to agree with him more often than with Chomsky. So what? Feet of clay.
What he says that makes people want to find him to be a liar and bigot, which for all his faults he shows no real evidence of being, just escapes me. My best guess is that his ethical analyses have a blind spot in that they overlook liberal conclusions that have ended the conversation about things like profiling, torture, and nuclear first strikes. His critics seem to be saying “Yes, profiling could be a rational allocation of investigatory resources but it also has great scope for abuse so we don’t profile here. End of discussion.” (Well, actually they don’t admit that first part.) He wants to open those discussions again, and not just as far-out thought experiments. That causes such visceral discomfort for some people that he has to be demonized. Just a guess.
Okay, that part I totally agree with. I’m kinda glad I’m not the only one. However, you say he’s a neuroscientist like creation PhDs are biologists. I think a more apt analogy would be that he’s a neuroscientist in the same way Mayim Bialik is a neuroscientist.
Race, ethnicity, or religion-based profiling is not rational.
Mayim Bialik! Perfect! “Coming up next, a very special experiment.” But though less apt, I picked my analogy for an obvious reason. We don’t want to open doors to undeserved cred for creationists. When Asimov was confronted with the existence of creationist scientists, he used to say, “Anyone can call himself a scientist.” But we don’t have to let it go unchallenged.
I’m not persuaded by Harris’s arguments on profiling either, but I don’t think he makes them because he’s a horrible person. He makes them because he’s not very good at probability computations, at game theory (e.g. the bad guys’ response when profiling is implemented) or at weighing the benefits against the social costs of the abuses that would occur. I see an occasion for counter-argument here, not invective.
That’s the thing, security experts have already weighed in. The profiling is already demonstrated as useless or outright detrimental to security. So, it does nothing but discriminate. It’s a settled question. Yet, Harris continues to pursue it anyway. Thus the accusations of bigotry.
Attempting to reopen the discussion is only harmful, like if he were trying to reopen the discussion of balancing humors.
Prove that with evidence, which is provided by experts in the field, not mere opinion. Can’t be done. Which is why us scientific types hear a paranoid bigot in Harris. He doesn’t give a shit about reality, just his emotions.
@40
His arguments are not persuasive, indeed. But he is a horrible person because his arguments just about always result in freedoms being taken away from “the others”, principally Muslims. Islamic based terrorism is indeed a huge concern. So is violence (terrorism!) by white Americans in the US through gun violence. But Sam, as a white American, doesn’t suggest that white Americans should be profiled as dangerous. Quite the opposite. He proudly owns guns as his 2A right. In Israel/Palestine, Israeli violence, which kills many more innocents than Palestinian violence, is ‘more moral’ because Israeli intensions are ‘good’. According to whom? Well, according to Sam. Again, funny how his position negates the rights and the reality of the same group.
Rarely do people admit to being a bigot towards a group of people. Sam isn’t going to say ‘I hate Muslims’. But when time again he singles out a group as worse, when the evidence for his position is murky and complex at best, you start to understand his positions aren’t rational, but prejudice. This makes him a horrible person.
Talk about bad logic, that was a terrible article. You should at least read them first, PZ.
OK, I see the attitude here, it’s been fun. However, in case you do care what Harris really says, he has consistently said that his case for profiling means that he, himself, would be profiled (male, aged 40s, olive skinned, easily might be from mideast). He’s talking about shifting scrutiny away from Betty White to people like himself, going a bit further than what TSA already does by not requiring kids and the elderly to take off their shoes. Again, I agree with you it won’t work, partly because Betty White will indeed be carrying the next bomb if she is exempted from all scrutiny. Some of my language indicates that you fit into one of the three categories in my first post however, so with this, I’ll leave you to your hating.
Evidence where PZ was wrong please….
No, you leave us with your lies and bullshit to defend somebody who is beyond logical reach, pretending to be deep and scientific. So not.
@46
Not a question of “evidence” really. Just my opinion that it was a crappy article and I am surprised that PZ, who is usually so good at spotting crap, put that up. I largely agree with 34 on the analysis. I just felt reading the article that the guy (or gal, didn’t really check) repeatedly said that arguments were logical contradictions when they actually were not.
@45
Classic Harrisian play. Let me play it back. When did I mention airport screening? You are misquoting me. When I said profiling I only meant his agreement that the US should profile Syrian immigrants Damn, I feel dirty playing that. Spin it how you want, he made several statements that he agreed with the idea of (we should consider) profiling immigrants based on their religion (and not their ideology). Don’t tell me what Sam Harris said like I’m a fucking infant.
Also, where is my hating? I outlined bigoted behavior. You offered no challenge to what I said. Instead you patronized me by saying I fit into one of your categories. Thanks for the profile.
No, it hasn’t been fun. It’s been tedious. Again.
“Person” works.
Care to elucidate, with evidence? Just opinion doesn’t fly.
I am not trying to fly
@51
Ok, quickly…
I saw a few points in the article. One was that Harris said Cruz is ‘completely crazy’, and then asked ‘Is it crazy to express, as Cruz did, …’
As far as I can tell the only problem here is with the word ‘completely’, which would mean, if one were a literal automaton, that every single one of his ideas are insane. The literal machine, knowing that Cruz is ‘completely crazy’, is offended by the later assertion that ‘it is totally unhelpful to treat him, though he actually is a religious maniac, like a bigot on this point’. Because the machine is prohibited from agreeing with Cruz on any single point, because he is ‘completely crazy’, therefore it must be *helpful* to treat him like a bigot on this and every other point, but Harris said *unhelpful*; ergo Harris is irrational… score! Straight to publication!
Second point: Robot says:
‘Sam, if your claim that Cruz’s immigration policy represents ‘a quite reasonable concern to voice’ does not indicate ‘sympathy for Ted Cruz’s politics’ then I don’t know what would.’
What are Ted Cruz’ politics and what would it mean to have sympathy for them? It would mean a lot more than just finding one item reasonable. I wouldn’t describe myself as being sympathetic with George Bush’s politics, but I also don’t think he is unreasonable on every single item without exception.
The last point about Israel is a similar case of nerdy robotic – dare I say motivated? – reasoning.
I hope you don’t think this is ‘evidence’ of anything.
So….option B? Completely vacuous, devoid of any meaning or purpose and a complete waste of time picking an unnecessary and pointless nit for no reason whatsoever? Ok…
Stupid question, which you should have answered, not evaded. Typical of factless nitpickers, who have no point.
@56
I really don’t understand your meaning here. You asked me to elaborate. Perhaps you could address what I said with some points of your own? Or maybe I have put myself on the ‘wrong side’ of on issue which you are incapable of defending without resorting to nonsensical name calling?
@k5083
Superficially the statements are not contradictory. However consider why “It makes sense to prefer Christians over Muslims” – well because Muslims are more prone than Christians to support Sharia law (ha ha good one Harris). But lets say that was the supreme test – We let in those people who favor secular democracies over theocracies (or those who favor peace over violence)
Then you would not phrase this as prefer Christians over Muslims , correct ? You’d phrase it as let in people who favor democracy or peace and let the numbers be whatever they are.
The only way to justify prefer Christians over Muslims is if
a. You believe Christians in general are better (in whatever aspect you choose) than the average population- I don’t think Harris believes that OR
b. Muslims in general are worse (in whatever aspect) – The Harris position
AND you do not have an easy way to effectively test that aspect and can only make an in general statement (else as above you’d phrase it in terms of the test).
And hence if Muslims in general are worse, then the next logical question should be “Why admit any Muslim at all?” – Trump like views are the logical consequence of Prefer Christians over Muslims and in that sense the 2 points expressed by Harris are contradictory.
Sam Harris. The Deepak Chopra of atheism.