Making Sense - Sam Harris - #245 — Can We Talk About Scary Ideas？

In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, I speak with Prof. Peter Singer, Prof. Francesca Minervais and Prof. Jeff McManaman about their new journal, The Journal of Controversial ideas, a journal dedicated to the ethics of exploring dangerous ideas and the taboo around the topic of race and identity, and the relationship between activism and academia. We revisit Peter's famous, shallow-pond argument for doing good anyway, and revisit his famous, "Shallow Pond argument for do good anyway," a fascinating area all too timely and quite relevant to growing concerns around cancel culture, free speech, political hyper-partisanship and the general dysfunction in our institutions now and now without further delay. As always, as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. If you can t afford a subscription, there's an option at Sam Harris' website where you can request a free account and get 100% of the podcast's premium features, including the Journal of Disroversial Ideas, for as little as $99 a year! You can get a 100% discount on the journal by becoming a supporter of the project, and you'll receive 100% access to all of the journal's core articles and all of its special features, plus a 20% discount when you become a patron. We don't run ads on the podcast and get 10% off the price of $5 or more! Want to become a supporter? Become a patron? You get 20% off your first month with the discount code: MINDINGMINDINGERICA at makingsense.org, and get a chance to save $50 or more? . I'm making sense, plus 5% off of the next month, plus an additional $50 off the first month free shipping, plus I'll send you an ad-free version of the making sense edition of the book, making sense of the first issue of Making Sense, plus you get $5, and I'll get a discount of $50, and a free shipping on the second month, and they'll get an ad discount on my book, too get an extra $10, and an ad on the book that's coming out in the third month, too! I'll have access to a $100, and all that gets you an entire month of the final month for a year of making sense? I can't wait to hear back from you?

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:57.000 okay well today i'm speaking with peter singer francesca minerva and jeff mcmahon peter is a

00:01:08.600 professor of bioethics at princeton and he's been on the podcast before he focuses on practical ethics

00:01:15.960 and is extraordinarily well known for his book animal liberation which is pretty close to the

00:01:23.000 foundation of the animal rights movement he's also written a lot about global poverty and has been

00:01:30.120 deeply inspirational to effective altruists everywhere francesca minerva is a research

00:01:36.360 fellow at the university of milan and her research focuses on applied ethics medical and bioethics

00:01:43.880 discrimination and academic freedom among other topics and jeff mcmahon is a professor of moral

00:01:51.720 philosophy at oxford university and he focuses on a range of issues related to harm and benefit

00:01:58.920 including war self-defense and defense of others abortion infanticide euthanasia personal identity

00:02:07.880 the moral status of animals the ethics of causing future people to exist i.e. having children

00:02:14.760 disability philanthropy philanthropy and other topics and the proximate cause of this episode is that the

00:02:22.680 three of them are launching a new journal the journal of controversial ideas and this is the focus of our

00:02:29.960 conversation we discuss the ethics of exploring dangerous ideas and then we jump into some specific

00:02:35.960 ones talk about the possibility of having a market in vaccines the taboo around the topic of race and iq

00:02:42.760 the relationship between activism and academia we revisit peter's famous shallow pond argument for

00:02:49.880 doing good anyway a fascinating area all too timely and quite relevant to growing concerns around cancel

00:02:59.320 culture and free speech political hyper partisanship and the general dysfunction in our institutions now

00:03:07.800 and now without further delay i bring you peter singer francesca minerva and jeff mcmahon

00:03:14.920 i am here with peter singer francesca minerva and jeff mcmahon great to meet all of you we're spanning the globe

00:03:28.920 here so yeah peter you're in australia that's right once you each introduce yourselves briefly i will do

00:03:36.520 something proper in the intro here but what are you each focused on i guess let's start with you peter

00:03:44.440 you've been on the podcast before people will be familiar but let's just bring you in as a now a

00:03:49.800 podcast repeat what are you up to these days i'm continuing to be professor of bioethics at

00:03:55.480 princeton university i'm working on a range of questions in ethics issues relating to global

00:04:03.480 poverty issues relating to animals i'm actually currently doing a revised edition of my book

00:04:11.160 animal liberation which came out first in 1975 and need some updating so i'm hoping to get that done

00:04:17.720 sometime this year so it'll be out next year and i've been working on issues relating to the pandemic

00:04:23.480 and ethical questions about doing human challenge trials about vaccine distribution there's a lot

00:04:29.400 of things keeping me busy oh great francesca i am a researcher at the university of milan

00:04:36.520 i mostly work on discrimination based on physical appearance but i also work on longevity immortality

00:04:45.480 and other bioethical issues like enhancement and conscientious objection in medicine and jeff i'm the

00:04:56.840 whites professor of moral philosophy at oxford university i've done a lot of work on issues in practical

00:05:03.880 ethics issues like abortion infanticide war but recently i've been working on a book on what's called

00:05:11.400 population ethics issues having to do with causing people to exist uh which notoriously difficult

00:05:19.320 area of ethics and i'm trying to show that a lot of the problems and paradoxes in population ethics

00:05:26.840 are essential to understanding a broad range of other issues in practical ethics

00:05:32.120 ethics well almost by definition we could talk about the most interesting and consequential things

00:05:40.040 that face us as a species uh there's so much to talk about but this conversation is occasioned by

00:05:48.360 you guys starting a new journal the journal of controversial ideas and i if i'm not mistaken this is a

00:05:55.640 a response to the perceived crisis in academia around you know political correctness wokeness cancel

00:06:04.440 culture uh spreading allergy really an autoimmune disorder intellectually speaking to ideas that

00:06:14.040 make people uncomfortable i don't know which of you wants to kick us off here but what what is

00:06:19.160 this project and just how concerned are you about the state of our intellectual discourse can can i just

00:06:26.040 say one thing first i think it'd be probably appropriate for peter to lead off with the main

00:06:30.840 comment but i just wanted to say that uh our concern is every bit as much with efforts to suppress

00:06:38.760 free speech coming from the political right as it is with efforts coming from the from the left

00:06:45.400 sure yeah sure i can say something although i i do want to say that it was really francesca who's

00:06:52.440 had this idea and brought it to me many years ago of uh responding trying to produce a journal where

00:06:59.960 people who wanted to publish anonymously or under a pseudonym would be able to do so but it would still be

00:07:08.360 a basically an academic journal a peer-reviewed journal that would be

00:07:14.120 rigorously reviewed so that getting into it would not be easy there would be high standards of

00:07:21.160 publication but people could protect themselves against getting a lot of harassment or threats or

00:07:29.400 harming their academic career by publishing controversial ideas and i know that francesca

00:07:34.760 herself was was influenced by an experience that she and her co-author had when they published an article

00:07:41.960 about infanticide and francesca can tell you about that i earlier on had also somewhat similar

00:07:51.160 experiences when i was silenced in germany when i was speaking about euthanasia for severely disabled

00:08:00.040 newborn infants and that incidentally those opposition came both from the conservative christian right

00:08:06.600 and to some extent from the disability movement with which some on the on the left were aligned but

00:08:13.560 there were of course a lot of other incidents academics who were threatened or harassed or had articles

00:08:22.120 retracted because they were controversial even though they'd been accepted by peer review and that was

00:08:29.160 really the driving force between trying to set up a place where people could publish and where they

00:08:35.560 would know that articles would not be retracted just because of some political backlash and where as i

00:08:41.320 said if they wish to publish anonymously and not all of our articles will be anonymous or under a pseudonym

00:08:47.960 in fact the majority of them that we've received so far are not but if authors wish to do that

00:08:54.360 they will be able to do so francesca why don't you say a little bit more about your inspiration for the

00:09:00.440 journal yes i published this article in the journal medical ethics in 2012 it was a co-author article

00:09:08.840 and it was about moral status of newborns comparing it with the moral status of fetuses which is a topic

00:09:17.480 that has been explored several over several years in philosophy peter has written about it jeff has written

00:09:23.720 about it but when we published that article things got a bit out of hand because at that point in 2012

00:09:33.240 social media uh were available the internet was a big thing and some right-wing online magazines and

00:09:43.240 newspapers picked up the news about this article and started spreading information about it

00:09:53.720 misinformation about it actually uh because the titles and the articles summarizing it summarizing the

00:10:01.080 content of this academic paper were not very accurate so very quickly we got a lot of death threats and

00:10:09.000 online abuse and at the beginning that was quite scary also we were at the beginning of our career so we were

00:10:19.080 quite surprised by this reaction but soon after i realized that the main threat wasn't really like the

00:10:28.600 kind of physical threats that they were mentioned in the emails i was receiving mostly from christians and

00:10:37.000 right-wing people but i started being worried about my career prospects and because i was told that i could not be

00:10:47.640 hired because i was too controversial and in the following years i kept looking at what's happening in academia

00:10:58.200 and i realized that these kind of episodes were becoming more and more common so there were becca

00:11:05.720 to well and the winston the christiacis the bruce gilly a lot of people were getting a lot of negative

00:11:12.600 reaction in reaction in some cases from the general public like in my case but increasingly from inside

00:11:21.720 academia itself so i realized that we started getting having a problem of self-censorship either because

00:11:29.960 people were worried about being the subject of these death threats but also because people were worried about

00:11:38.840 their career because we started having a lot of petitions and letters to get people fired or having

00:11:47.320 their papers retracted so i talked about this concern with peter and jeff and and we decided to start this

00:11:55.400 journal and after quite a few years working on this project we are almost ready to publish our first issue

00:12:04.280 which should come out around the 15 of april well it seems to me there's a kind of demarcation problem

00:12:12.200 here where at least two concerns should kind of bound our discourse about the nature of the world and

00:12:22.440 and how we should all be living within it and one is just the finiteness of time and attention right we all

00:12:29.720 have a certain amount of of hours to spend on this earth and we can choose to spend them you know one

00:12:36.920 way or the other and the question is well why spend any significant amount of time focused on questions

00:12:46.360 where either the question or the possible answers produce a significant concern about harm right so there's

00:12:55.640 some possibility of dangerous knowledge the terrain is so ethically charged it produces a

00:13:03.320 an experience of revulsion in the better part of humanity that may even just hear about the topic

00:13:10.520 and so there's there's just this question of okay well just why do it on certain topics and then

00:13:16.280 there's just apart from just the opportunity costs and the wastage of time there's this concern about

00:13:22.760 some kind of ethical and intellectual negligence because there are foreseeable harms that crop up

00:13:31.480 down many of these paths right so you're going to just take the i don't know what your actual thesis

00:13:36.840 was you know in discussing the moral status of infants versus fetuses but for someone to spend a lot of

00:13:44.280 time on the question of time on the question of why the impediments to infanticide or as high as they are

00:13:53.080 could seem to many people to be just a an all-too-casual prying at the lid of pandora's box right i mean

00:14:00.360 perhaps this this isn't the best example of that because i you know i'm sure there's an argument for the

00:14:05.640 the the unconscionable suffering of that that is allowed to persist for certain babies that are

00:14:11.400 bound to die soon um and so this there's an argument for euthanasia there which most or many

00:14:17.400 people will be sensitive to but i guess i'm just asking a generic question about this boundary that

00:14:23.480 the three of you are contemplating and just how you will make choices about what to what's legitimate

00:14:31.080 for inclusion and what isn't here it seems to me that the best way to avoid wrongful harm

00:14:38.680 is to be able to identify which kinds of harm are genuinely wrongful all of this requires thought and

00:14:45.640 reflection and discussion it's not as if we know the answers to these difficult moral issues

00:14:51.640 a priori we simply have to think these things through if we unless we want to just be guided by

00:14:58.600 ignorance and superstition if we can't talk about things and discuss them investigate the different

00:15:07.960 views that people have subject them to reasoned scrutiny we're just going to be casting about

00:15:13.880 blindly and we're much more likely to do harm that way than we are if we think things through

00:15:19.080 rationally looking at the evidence and entertaining listening to and thinking about all the

00:15:28.280 different positions that uh people might have on the issues ignoring these ignoring these questions

00:15:36.520 is the worst thing we can do it seems to me there are some limits i mean that is to say if we can

00:15:42.520 if we know or have good reason to believe that some open discussion of some issue really is going to do

00:15:49.320 harm to innocent people then that's of course a very very good reason not to discuss it but i think that's

00:15:55.160 that's a quite rare phenomenon and that we're much more likely to do harm through ignorance

00:16:01.400 than we are through careful reasoned discussion of issues yeah peter francesca do you have anything on

00:16:08.200 that i certainly agree that i i think the general view is that being able to discuss things openly is

00:16:15.880 likely to lead us to a better informed more thoughtful reflective understanding of the issue

00:16:24.520 and that that's likely to produce better results in the long run you know you talk about harms and

00:16:31.400 of course sometimes you can see immediate possible harms a lot of the cancel culture has been about

00:16:38.680 you know not offending people not threatening their sense of themselves or their identity or something

00:16:44.280 like that that is an obvious harm right there but there may be other harms through not discussing issues

00:16:51.800 through not allowing people to have their say and to point out some of the drawbacks of current

00:16:58.840 practices perhaps which you know will will go on and will continue and i think we should have confidence

00:17:06.680 that open discussion and trying to get to the truth of the situation and to the best and most

00:17:13.640 thoughtful and justified views of the situation is in the long run likely to produce a better outcome

00:17:20.920 a better well-being for all of those affected and reduced harm so you know i think that's the basis on

00:17:28.920 which we we generally answer those questions and i agree with jeff you know you can imagine situations

00:17:33.880 where you would not do this some years ago a magazine called the progressive published an account

00:17:40.520 of how to make a an h-bomb and you know i think there i would say well it's not clear to me that this

00:17:47.880 is something that everybody needs to know and and scientists scientists nowadays have similar questions

00:17:53.880 with how to engineer viruses that would produce a pandemic you know deliberately i i maybe those are

00:18:00.760 those are things we would not publish that's not what we're looking for we're looking for

00:18:04.920 discussions and ideas where we think it's reasonable to want more people to be involved

00:18:10.920 in this and to try to be better informed and more thoughtful yeah i guess i'm trying to find both

00:18:19.480 sides of that line and in my imagination here i guess i have a couple of examples off the top of my head

00:18:24.520 that uh where one falls kind of well inside of it and one falls perhaps just outside i guess perhaps

00:18:33.080 you could react to this i mean so the one example from our current circumstance now where we're having

00:18:41.160 this conversation that one hopes is the tail end of the covet pandemic and it seems to me that there's

00:18:49.000 probably been discussion about this but if there has i haven't heard it but it's at least an interesting

00:18:54.680 ethical question as to whether there should be a market in vaccine privileges right so people who

00:19:02.920 have earlier spots in line who may actually not want to get a vaccine because they're they're worried

00:19:08.680 about you know vaccine technology could they sell their spots to people who would want to buy them

00:19:14.040 right i'm sure there are many wealthy people who would like to spend a lot of money to get a vaccine

00:19:20.280 months earlier than they otherwise are going to going to and i'm sure that if you floated that idea

00:19:27.800 on social media or certainly if you endorsed that idea on social media you could expect the swift

00:19:35.480 cancellation of your academic and perhaps professional prospects and there's an obvious harm

00:19:44.520 that comes from our inability to even discuss an idea like that whether whatever side we come down on

00:19:49.000 because that market could produce a lot of good obviously if billionaires early on could have been

00:19:56.440 given the opportunity to spend millions for the privilege of getting the vaccine early well then

00:20:01.720 those millions could have been used to to cancel the very inequalities that people are would be worried

00:20:08.600 about in in in their their ick reaction to a market and vaccines emerging in the first place and so that

00:20:17.240 seems to be something that we should talk about but can i say something about that go very briefly

00:20:22.360 sure uh we've been having debates for quite a long time about very similar issues for example the sale of

00:20:32.760 organs for transplantation and also just generally about how medical resources should be distributed in a

00:20:42.600 society i mean it's strange that if you went on to the internet and advocated the sort of proposal

00:20:48.920 that you have mentioned you would get attacked for that when people in the united states tolerate

00:20:56.200 rich people being able to get the very best medical treatment anywhere in the world and poor americans

00:21:02.360 being left out almost entirely so i mean there's a parallel debate about just how

00:21:09.880 ordinary medical care should be distributed doesn't seem to be fundamentally different from

00:21:14.200 what you're discussing about the sale of vaccines yeah that's a great point nevertheless sam if you wish

00:21:20.600 to write it up and submit it as a paper to the journal of controversial ideas we'll be very happy to have

00:21:25.000 it considered and if you want to do it under a pseudonym so that uh you know nobody knows it's your idea

00:21:30.600 although you have now let it out on this podcast i don't think my pseudonym is going to work at this

00:21:35.160 point all right so and then the other topic which is one i'm you know all too familiar with from this

00:21:42.280 podcast has been the taboo around discussing the data in um iq differences between populations right

00:21:54.520 i mean this is just absolutely radioactive and i stumbled onto this topic not because i have any

00:22:02.280 interest in iq per se much less in in racial or ethnic or population differences in it but because

00:22:11.560 i became very concerned after you know witnessing the defenestration of charles murray you know the

00:22:18.520 upteenth defenestration of charles murray in 25 years after he wrote his his infamous book i became

00:22:24.760 very worried that our society seems to imagine that something absolutely existential politically and

00:22:32.600 ethically rides on our not finding out that there are group differences right i mean it seems to me just

00:22:41.320 as a theoretical assumption extraordinarily likely that anything you would test between various

00:22:50.040 populations of human beings and no matter how much you want these mean values to be the same you will

00:22:56.680 find mean differences and this is not not just iq this is literally anything you could want to test

00:23:03.800 that you could measure you are going to find that the norwegians and the italians and the inuit and

00:23:09.240 the australian aborigines and or people who just identify with those groups and there may be be

00:23:15.400 imperfectly actually related to those groups you're going to find differences and it seems to me that

00:23:22.680 most of our society seems to believe that our future happiness and cooperation as a species depends on

00:23:30.760 that not being true because we would not be able to absorb those facts politically because they are so

00:23:37.880 toxic now this strikes me as absolutely absurd and there's nothing really riding on there being no

00:23:44.760 group differences but i do question and this is this is the one question i had for murray on my one

00:23:51.000 question i had for murray on my podcast with him why one would spend any significant time trying to

00:23:58.360 establish those differences or looking for those differences you know i i think we need to be able to

00:24:04.120 talk about this because we will be ambushed by evidence of those differences because we if we

00:24:09.240 just decide to study things like intelligence generically these distinctions between populations

00:24:16.280 may just leap out of the data and i have and we have good reason i think not to care about them

00:24:22.120 but i do question whether it's worth publishing somebody's heroic effort to establish the reality of these

00:24:32.040 differences because of the the social cost that can follow from that you know i don't know if you

00:24:37.880 think that's a distinction without a difference but i'm wondering how you feel about that example

00:24:43.080 well i actually think that you're right about this in that whether there are these differences or not

00:24:50.760 may not matter in the slightest that is to say what what people ought to be discussing it seems to me is

00:24:57.320 if there are such differences why why that should matter should it make any difference to the way

00:25:02.520 we think about any particular individual or about the way that we treat any particular group it might

00:25:08.680 if a group turns out on average you know to score lower on some measure that that's a reason to

00:25:17.400 provide disproportionate resources for that group in order for it to be able to achieve equality in in

00:25:25.160 in practice but we should what we should be questioning is whether any of these differences

00:25:31.640 whether at the individual level or at the group level make any difference whatsoever to moral status

00:25:38.120 and if they don't then it's unclear to me why anyone should be concerned if these differences

00:25:44.840 do emerge at the population level i'd slightly disagree with that jeff and that we as we are present

00:25:53.320 we feel that if there are differences in let's say you know the number of people who are admitted under

00:26:01.640 certain tests to elite universities if that does not admit a proportion of a certain minority group

00:26:10.360 that's similar to their proportion in the population that there's you know this must be

00:26:16.840 racist practices or or biases in the admission and so we go to significant lengths to try to overcome that

00:26:25.720 now you know that it may be relevant you know it may be that there are other causes that lead to

00:26:33.800 different results and that they're not the results of systemic racism which is the the assumption that we

00:26:41.160 currently make now you know what actions follow from that of course is a different question as you say

00:26:47.640 and it may be that uh even if we were to find that there are on average genetic differences in in

00:26:55.240 demographic groups it may be that that the result of that is we should put more effort into trying to

00:27:01.000 improve the environment of those demographic groups which do not have the same average scores as as

00:27:10.120 high as others that's that's what i was suggesting by the way yeah but i what i'm saying is in terms of

00:27:15.640 you know i'm not i wouldn't say that it makes no difference at all because it does make a difference

00:27:20.920 as to where we look for how we ought to respond to this and and rather than beating our chest and

00:27:26.760 saying we're such a racist society that we are in some subtle way that is not you know or maybe not

00:27:32.760 so subtle of course some of this is absolutely the opposite the opposite of being subtle but but that we

00:27:37.800 are looking for ways in which we ourselves are guilty of having these racist biases it it may be that

00:27:45.480 instead we ought to be saying no it's not it's not that but there are some other things in the in the

00:27:51.720 environment that we could help to to overcome this yeah i think i'm prepared to even go a step further

00:27:59.080 there and say that in in many of these cases you know specifically at an institution like your own

00:28:05.320 princeton you know to the contrary we not only is there not overt racism keeping certain groups out

00:28:14.280 and underrepresented if in fact they they still are underrepresented you know i think there there has

00:28:19.720 been a pretty active campaign of affirmative action at most schools like your own um though there are some

00:28:27.720 some exceptions and just to think of this more widely right there i do think it is pathological

00:28:35.320 for us to assume that unless every conceivable desirable position in society shows a perfectly

00:28:45.400 proportionate representation of the population the only explanation for that mismatch is bigotry

00:28:55.400 we know enough at this point to know that's not true if nothing else there are many cases where

00:29:00.760 there's just differential interest you know born of culture in some cases and in biology and others

00:29:06.280 i mean just look at the difference between men and women in their representation in in scientific

00:29:12.360 fields right there there fields in science that are now dominated by women i mean certainly by

00:29:18.360 more than 50 percent of psychologists and biologists at this point i think it's fair to say are women

00:29:26.600 at least in graduate schools now and there will be you know viewed with the the lens of bigotry

00:29:35.240 an unconscionably low number of women in engineering departments right and probably in physics departments

00:29:42.760 still and i i i'm not sure there there are any honest people left who think that bigotry is what explains

00:29:52.040 that i mean there's got to be some differential interest here and you know perhaps in certain cases

00:29:59.160 aptitude when you're talking about the the extremes of mathematical ability you know there's probably you

00:30:05.480 you know this is that this is the very claim that got larry summers thrown out of harvard when he

00:30:12.120 speculated that may perhaps the different representation between men and women in engineering

00:30:18.280 and physics and other you know almost purely quantitative fields is due to not different

00:30:25.240 means in those distributions but a different level of variance right so that the far you know you want to

00:30:31.000 get several standard deviations from the mean you could have many more men who with that mathematical

00:30:37.960 ability and at both tails right you know both the high end and the low end now that was that's a

00:30:43.000 hypothesis i think there's still some considerable evidence for it i don't i don't think that the jury's

00:30:50.280 in on that but you know if that just turns out to be true the fact that we spent any time at all

00:30:56.360 lacerating ourselves over you know now for many many many years over residual bigotry and misogyny

00:31:05.080 in these departments will seem like a you know a terrible misuse of energy is and again this is not

00:31:11.560 to say that misogyny hasn't been a problem and isn't still a problem in other cases but so i take

00:31:18.040 your point peter that there's understanding this will allow us to correct for a misdiagnosis of the

00:31:24.120 problem but i do think there's this added piece of around the perversity of just investigating in

00:31:33.480 areas where there's such an ick factor where one feels you know it's what good is going to come of

00:31:40.760 that you know if that's my first question upon hearing you know that someone is writing a 5 000

00:31:47.080 word piece for you on x and my first feeling about x is wow that just seems truly morbid i'm just

00:31:57.560 wondering if we can conceive of what that how we would find that boundary in principle or if you're

00:32:04.280 not really thinking about that you're just gonna know it when you see it well one thing to say about

00:32:11.080 that is that uh it's right that some people could investigate certain phenomena for the bad wrongful

00:32:25.240 discreditable reasons on the other hand sometimes results just show up as side effects of inquiry or

00:32:35.560 phenomena are just there and they call for some explanation so a lot depends on how these questions

00:32:45.240 arise and why they are pursued yeah i mean the results just showing up is the most important variable

00:32:55.160 from my point of view because it's they will just show up and we currently have a

00:33:02.120 social and intellectual order that is advertising its brittleness literally on a minute-by-minute basis

00:33:11.000 and there's there's just no reason for it i mean if we could render indelible our political commitments

00:33:19.080 to you know equality and compassion if we could articulate clearly enough what kind of society we want to

00:33:28.200 live in where individuals are treated as such and everyone was given every opportunity they could

00:33:37.240 possibly use to thrive right if that's our goal right and we're not you know covertly trying to to

00:33:44.760 engineer some some noxious political order where you know some groups benefit to the disadvantage of

00:33:52.040 others systematically i mean if we have a kind of rawlsian understanding of what this project is it seems to me we

00:34:00.920 should be able to talk about anything but we really do feel very far from that moment but i mean if we can

00:34:10.200 agree on on that and yes some people are going to be offended and going to feel hurt by the fact that we're

00:34:18.600 we're talking about somebody's working on infanticide or iq but this is also how we make progress

00:34:31.880 like 20 years ago it was considered absolutely at least in my country of origin which is a catholic

00:34:41.160 country italy you couldn't really tell even among like left-wing secular atheist people that gay marriage was

00:34:51.160 a good thing and that you know gay people should be allowed to adopt children to have children but then

00:34:59.160 the conversation started and yes a lot of people were annoyed offended hurt by the fact that people had this

00:35:08.520 non-catholic non-catholic non-religious views but 20 years later we now have gay marriage and you know

00:35:16.680 gay people can adopt and we have made a lot of progress with these rights and we can't tell before

00:35:24.040 we start talking about these issues whether the change for society is going to be for the better for

00:35:29.320 the worse but people anywhere are going to talk about these issues and i think it's better if

00:35:35.800 academics jump in the conversation and talk about these issues openly instead of letting that

00:35:45.400 conversation to some hidden groups that don't really get any feedback and don't really discuss

00:35:54.040 their ideas with the external world so we can have this conversation in in the open maybe we find out

00:36:00.520 that you know that you know there was a mistake in the data collection or there was a mistake in the

00:36:06.440 argument or there was a mistake in this view we had but this has to be discussed and some people will be

00:36:15.480 offended for sure and some people have been offended in the past but i think overall for a lot of issues

00:36:24.040 that was that was a good thing because it allowed us to to make progress like i mentioned in the case of

00:36:29.640 gay marriage and adoption i think you should probably lean into this and publish your journal

00:36:36.120 or the best selections from your journal every year around christmas as a coffee table book lavishly

00:36:42.200 illustrated and just use it to your advantage it could be a very interesting document what museum is

00:36:49.960 that is that is that is that the mutter museum that has collections of things that nobody everyone

00:36:57.240 would be otherwise terrified to see but i don't know about that yeah there's a museum that has you know

00:37:03.560 human anomalies you know cyclopses in formaldehyde and just ghastly things that uh i'll look it up i

00:37:12.680 forget where where this is so so what kinds of topics are you expecting slash hoping to publish on

00:37:22.600 francesca do you want to talk about the the papers that we've accepted in in broad terms um yes very

00:37:29.240 very broadly because i should be a surprise we um had some papers on animal rights some submission on

00:37:40.920 trans gender questions some papers on where's the group differences and um well we'll see what else is

00:37:55.080 going to be accepted so far we accepted around six seven papers and we hope that for the first issue

00:38:03.960 will have around 10 so there are various topics some more controversial than others but all quite

00:38:14.120 controversial well and i'll just add we we to go back to the previous conversation we do have one not

00:38:20.120 on group differences in intelligence but in more generally about the role that the genes play in

00:38:26.680 intelligence and the denial of that or the difficulty of talking about that in in some circles yeah i guess

00:38:37.160 if we can maybe just close the loop on that topic it's interesting to just to try to take the the thorn

00:38:43.720 out of this rose bush because for a person thinking about this particular problem i guess i i have my moral

00:38:53.000 intuitions have been so worn down on this that i i'm just not sure i can recapitulate the problem uh

00:38:59.960 here so it's just it's like you know i am uh i am half ashkenazi jew right so that's part of my group

00:39:08.520 identity i guess and genetically certainly and in part culturally and this is a group that has been much

00:39:14.360 celebrated for its for the you know the correlation of of its misadventures in the world with you know

00:39:21.560 mathematical ability among other intellectual abilities but it is patently obvious that knowing

00:39:28.840 my ashkenazi background tells you absolutely nothing about my mathematical ability and in my case

00:39:37.480 though i was never bad at math i'm certainly not good enough by nature so as to have gravitated toward

00:39:45.720 it as a career there is no question i do not have the genes of an alan turing here so what what am i

00:39:54.680 going to do with that and what is the basis for offense if i mean you know a person has whatever

00:40:01.480 they have in this space and they and they can make use of whatever opportunities they're given to the

00:40:07.720 degree that they're they can find them and it just seems to me obvious that we want a society where

00:40:14.680 the opportunities and incentives are such that every individual can flourish to the greatest possible

00:40:23.080 extent and that will be different in different cases and it's never a question of everyone being

00:40:29.000 equal in all of their capacities that's clearly a pipe dream and not even obviously a desirable one but

00:40:36.520 it is also a case that all boats can rise with whatever tide we can engineer to make life and

00:40:44.760 opportunity better and better for more and more people and that's the that's our ethical responsibility

00:40:50.520 here but the basis for offense or pride or anything that could correlate with any summary of group

00:40:57.960 differences i mean all i see is a very easy path to daylight to get past all that and um obviously that

00:41:06.200 is you know from one point of view that is my privilege talking but yeah i have the privilege to

00:41:10.520 recognize that there was no way i was going to be the next alan turing right through no fault of

00:41:17.480 fault of my own and i would you know and i i live in a world where it would be great to have that

00:41:24.520 native talent you know that's something that i would you know if i if i could buy it i certainly

00:41:28.760 would buy it but you know i'm playing different games as a result so i don't know if you have more

00:41:35.640 to add to that but it's just it feels like there's an there's a an ethical and psychological inoculation

00:41:42.200 we need to try to perform on more and more people to give them the ability to have the kinds of

00:41:49.800 conversations you're proposing we need to have i don't think it's quite as simple as that because

00:41:56.760 i think the fear is of information reinforcing stereotypes and even though as you correctly say

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 12, 2021

#245 — Can We Talk About Scary Ideas？

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