Making Sense - Sam Harris - #359 — Getting Used to It

Cass Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor and the co-author of several interesting books, including Nudge, Noise, and the latest, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. In this episode, Cass and I discuss the problem of habituation and its consequences, and what we can do about it. We discuss how we tend to habituate to both good and bad things, and how this can affect our perception of the world and our ability to make sense of it. And we talk about the potential benefits of this habituation, including how it can be harnessed to make us more aware of things we don t want to be aware of, like the noise in the room where we are in order to be more sensitive to things we do want to experience. We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here. You'll get access to our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford a full-time college education. There's no ads, and you'll get free accounts, and access to all the benefits that come with the scholarship programs, including early-bird pricing, early access to the podcast, and much more! Thanks for listening to the Making Sense Podcast! -Sam Harris This is a note to say that if you're not currently on our subscriber feed, you'll need to subscribe to our podcast and we'll only be hearing the first part of this episode of the podcast by becoming a member of our podcasting program, so you won't miss out on the second part of the second half of the conversation. . In order to access full episodes of the making sense Podcast? , you'll also find our scholarship Program, where you'll be able to access the full episode. , where we'll also get a discount code: "Making Sense Podcast." and so on. ...and so on and so much more... (Make Sense Podcasts) - The Making Sense Podcasts! -- Samharris -- ... And so on is the most cited legal scholar in the U.S. Law School Podcast The most cited author in the US Supreme Court professor in the world, and from 2009 to 2012, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

00:00:11.640 you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be

00:00:15.580 hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making

00:00:19.840 Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our

00:00:24.960 scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one.

00:00:28.340 We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support

00:00:32.860 of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

00:00:45.220 Today I'm speaking with Cass Sunstein. Cass is the most cited legal scholar in the U.S.,

00:00:52.600 and from 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of

00:00:59.180 Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since then, he's served in various capacities in the U.S.

00:01:04.720 government and advised many nations, as well as the United Nations, the Asian Development Bank,

00:01:10.740 and the World Health Organization. He is a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-author

00:01:17.240 of several interesting books, Nudge, Noise, and his latest, which he wrote with Tali Sharot,

00:01:26.120 is Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. And today Cass and I speak about the book.

00:01:33.320 We talk about habituation and its consequences, the way we habituate to positive and negative experiences.

00:01:39.660 We discuss things like marriage and happiness and meaning and variety, doing good versus feeling

00:01:48.000 good, midlife crises, having kids, wealth and happiness, things versus experience, and we pivot to

00:01:57.900 topics of more political relevance. We talk about the illusory truth effect, misinformation and social

00:02:04.880 media, echo chambers and extremism, what governments can do to respond to misinformation, free speech

00:02:12.280 on college campuses, the 2024 presidential election, and other topics. And now I bring you Cass Sunstein.

00:02:26.760 I'm here with Cass Sunstein. Cass, thanks for joining me again.

00:02:30.600 Thanks for having me. Great pleasure.

00:02:32.060 So there's a lot to talk about, some of which is contained in your new book. So I think we'll start

00:02:37.660 there. The book which you wrote with Tali Sharot is Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always

00:02:45.840 There, which is focused on this fascinating problem. And I mean, in some ways, it's a problem. I guess in

00:02:54.600 other ways, it's an advantage. But the problem of habituation and what to do about it. I mean,

00:03:01.340 we habituate to both good and bad things. And you'd think that habituating to bad things would be good,

00:03:07.040 but certainly not always. How do you think about this? First, what is habituation?

00:03:12.540 Okay. So suppose you're going into the ocean, and in the first seconds, it's horrible. It's really cold.

00:03:20.880 And you're thinking, why am I going into the ocean to freeze myself? And then after a few seconds,

00:03:28.280 it's cold. And then a little while later, it's okay. And then a little while later, come on in,

00:03:35.580 the water's fine. Many things are like that, meaning we have showed diminishing sensitivity to stimuli.

00:03:43.280 So if you go into a room and there's some smell, maybe someone smoking, maybe there's a dog who had

00:03:51.200 a moment, you will smell the smell and think, this is really stinky. And then after 20 minutes,

00:03:58.380 chances are you won't notice it. Right now, there may be a noise in the room where you are,

00:04:04.160 and you're not noticing it because you've habituated to it. And that's kind of how our species

00:04:09.940 is. And in fact, that's how all living creatures are. The more we're exposed to things, the less

00:04:16.280 sensitive we are to them. Yeah. So just neurologically speaking, we have these internal

00:04:21.880 models of how our perceptual state should be, is expected to be. It's just a predictive coding

00:04:29.720 routine, both with respect to perception and our behavioral engagement with the world. And when

00:04:36.640 things conform to our predictions, our responses to them, their salience becomes inhibited and things

00:04:43.540 just begin to fade. And we tend to notice errors and prediction errors. And again, this can be to

00:04:51.440 positive or negative stimuli. On the face of it, habituation to negative things sounds like it would

00:04:59.080 be good. What's the potential problem with that?

00:05:01.760 Well, it's good in many ways. I can't fly. I don't have wings. And I also can't make the Olympic

00:05:09.340 basketball team. And neither of those is making me suffer. I've habituated.

00:05:14.320 Not anymore?

00:05:16.720 Never could I make the Olympic basketball team. And I never thought, oh my gosh, surprise,

00:05:22.400 I'm not going to make it. I habituated early to the fact that I can't fly and I can't do what

00:05:28.780 Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and LeBron James can do. So to habituate to something that just you

00:05:35.920 can't do has many advantages. It means you're not having a surprise signal that deflates and

00:05:42.120 demoralizes you every moment that your winglessness attaches you to the ground. But with respect to

00:05:49.260 something bad, it may be that there's something that can be changed and that is kind of not good in

00:05:56.200 the world or in your life that you habituate yourself to, that you live with and don't even

00:06:02.620 form a sour face. You just think it is what it is. My nominee for the worst phrase in the English

00:06:09.900 language, it's terrible. But it's the phrase of the habituating creature. It is what it is.

00:06:16.460 And if you're living with, let's say, someone who's really mean at the workplace, you might get used

00:06:22.180 to it. So after a couple of weeks, you don't notice it so much. But still, the person is really

00:06:26.900 mean. Or if you're in a town that has dirty water or a high level of crime, or let's say corruption,

00:06:33.460 something that is bad for you and bad for the community, the fact that it's a little like cold

00:06:39.180 water whose coldness you don't notice after a while, that means it's going to stay there when it

00:06:45.280 may not be inevitable. Yeah. Well, there are some things that I fear we're habituating to

00:06:50.340 in our politics and public life that I will bring up in a while with you because you're an expert on

00:06:57.840 those topics. But before we get there, what are you, so having written this book, are you doing

00:07:04.600 anything differently in your life or is it born of anything you have been doing differently in your

00:07:09.720 life so as to increase the sense of novelty and accentuate your pleasures and minimize your

00:07:16.660 pains? How are you applying this to your actual experience? Well, the most immediate thing is I'm

00:07:21.420 on book tour. And the book produced a book tour, and that's new for me. And incredibly painful?

00:07:28.300 No, I'm loving it. And I get to talk to you. So thank you. It's a fantastic stroke of luck that

00:07:36.240 people want to hear about this or are willing to hear about this. So that's an experience that

00:07:42.820 doesn't have habituation in it. But in terms of my own life, I look at my children and my dogs

00:07:49.800 since I've been working on this book with a sense of discovery and amazement. And while I adored my

00:07:58.040 children and my dogs too since the day I first got to see all four of them, and my bigger daughter,

00:08:05.420 so five of them, the fact that I can see them as a miracle rather than just part of life

00:08:12.220 is occasioned by the book. So Julia Roberts, the actor, is a hero of the book. She said in an

00:08:19.560 interview pretty recently while we were in the midst of writing the book that her favorite day,

00:08:24.120 her best day, is when she makes food for her kids, she makes the breakfast, and she has lunch with her 1.00

00:08:29.160 husband. And she stops herself and says, it's boring. But then she adds, because of my job,

00:08:35.620 I go away, I come back to my family life, and it's surrounded by pixie dust. It re-sparkles.

00:08:43.140 And that notion of re-sparkling with respect to, you know, I get to have a place to live that's

00:08:49.240 nice enough, and I get to, my job is mostly teaching. I see these things with more a sense

00:08:57.300 of amazement than, you know, that's life, partly because of the book.

00:09:03.760 Yeah, one of your experts in the book, Esther Perel, sounds like she's recommending that

00:09:09.500 people actually strategically take some separation from one another, you know, romantically,

00:09:16.040 so as to revivify the connection. I mean, whether it's a night or a weekend or, you know, a business

00:09:22.700 trip or whatever it is, there's something about, you know, there's the obvious cliche, you know,

00:09:28.620 absence makes the heart grow fonder. But she's claiming that it does, and we sort of ignore that

00:09:34.620 at our peril. She has something very specific to say, and I should say that I met Esther Perel because

00:09:41.080 we were, I was, at a wedding, and to see her at a wedding is pretty remarkable because she writes

00:09:49.740 about marriage and some of the... It's like seeing the Grim Reaper at a wedding.

00:09:54.040 That's right, a little ominous. She's a very nice and upbeat person. And at the dinner,

00:09:58.920 we talked a bit about marriage, and her focus is on the deadening of romantic sparks. And so her

00:10:07.000 great line is, fire needs air. And that's because people habituate to everything, including an amazing

00:10:14.540 person you get to live with. So she says when members of couples are most attracted to each

00:10:20.760 other, and this is based on her experience, it's often they see each other across a crowded room

00:10:26.580 talking to somebody else. And that's because that dishabituates you. The person isn't just the

00:10:32.520 person you live with. The person is, in some respects, a stranger. And then you think, my gosh,

00:10:38.120 that's amazing. And this is true of general things in life, good things, which may be there's no air

00:10:45.040 between us and them. And that makes us like them. They can be comfortable and pleasant, but they don't

00:10:51.120 have a sense of sparkle. There's no pixie dust around them.

00:10:56.380 How do you apply these insights, if you do, to your conception of your own life, your career at

00:11:04.900 this point, and whatever goals you have, or explicit or implicit? I mean, there's certainly

00:11:12.480 some wisdom to be extracted here with respect to how we think about human flourishing and the

00:11:19.120 relationship of things like wealth and success to that ambition. If you could go back in time and

00:11:27.640 talk to your, whatever, 20-year-old self, at some point where you probably were not as informed as

00:11:34.120 you are now, what would you say about the importance of wealth and success and having a career that not

00:11:43.060 only brought you those two things, but something that was more in line with a vocation, something that

00:11:48.520 was directly tapping you into meaning, you know, because you have a, you know, I will have properly

00:11:53.380 introduced you before we started talking here, but you have a many, many irons in the fire. You know,

00:11:59.200 you have, you, I think are often described as the most cited legal scholar in the country. And you've

00:12:07.220 served in government. You have been a creature of the university. You have written and co-written a

00:12:13.720 number of books on diverse topics that would seem to be just you following your intellectual

00:12:19.940 interests into, into fun spaces. So you're, you're doing a lot and you have experienced a lot of

00:12:26.240 success. You have been surrounded by successful, powerful people. What lessons can you draw about

00:12:32.640 all that? Well, I think I'd be very cautious talking to my younger self on the ground that my younger

00:12:39.780 self would have a perspective that I lack and I might kind of screw him up. But if he would listen

00:12:46.160 to me, and since he is me, he probably would, though with a sense of the surreal science fictional

00:12:52.340 quality of it, I'd say follow the path you think best. You probably will make some not terrible choices.

00:13:01.000 But I guess I'd add something I know, which is that there are three things that people really care

00:13:06.720 about. One is that they're happy, meaning that the days are smile-producing rather than tear-producing,

00:13:15.240 that they're enjoying days, they're not feeling scared or anxious. But that's not the only thing.

00:13:22.220 People also want to have a sense of meaning. So if you have a day where you're, you know,

00:13:27.680 scowling a fair bit, not smiling a whole lot, but you're doing something that you consider

00:13:32.760 valuable and honorable and makes you feel you're contributing, that might be not a very happy day,

00:13:40.260 but it might be a super meaningful day. And the idea of trying to seek both happiness and meaning

00:13:46.720 is when I think my younger self didn't get that well. I think my younger self probably was

00:13:53.020 a little low on the meaning side and a little higher on the happiness side.

00:13:58.240 That person happened to luck into meaning, but it wasn't sought. Maybe there's a lesson there.

00:14:04.380 But there's a third thing, which I think your question gets at, which recent data puts in a big

00:14:12.180 font, which is that people need psychological richness too, meaning variety in their life.

00:14:19.080 So if you have someone who has really happy life and it's full of meaning, if it's the same thing

00:14:24.660 over and over again, both the happiness and the meaning are going to get less colorful over time.

00:14:32.040 So if you spend 10 years, let's say, doing cancer research, which is incredibly meaningful,

00:14:38.520 you may think I'm going to do 11 and 12 and 13 and 14 years also on that. But it may be that the

00:14:46.280 sense of amazement that you have that you get to do it diminishes and even evaporates.

00:14:53.760 And so people will sacrifice happiness and meaning for the sake of variety. And I've been lucky to

00:15:02.080 have a fair bit of variety that even now I have some role in government as well as some role as an

00:15:10.800 academic. And so on Monday, I might be trying to figure out something about the Constitution.

00:15:16.200 And on Thursday, I might be able to participate in the process where we're trying to solve some very

00:15:21.360 concrete problem. And one's theoretical and abstract and the other is intensely in the next two days,

00:15:28.780 how we're going to handle this. And they're very different mindsets. And I'm smiling because

00:15:34.240 the skill set is so different. But it may be that I'm thrilled to do both because I get to do both.

00:15:41.240 Yeah, I'm struck by the distinction between the good we do in the world and the way it feels to do

00:15:50.300 such good or to do anything. And those are often not at all coupled to one another, which is you can

00:15:58.400 write a very large check to an organization that's saving lives in the most efficient way possible.

00:16:04.020 And your experience of writing that check could be one of just total distraction and a lack of

00:16:12.760 salience, right? You've decided to write the check. You know in the abstract you support this

00:16:18.180 organization. But you're just dashing off this philanthropy as you go about your day. And you

00:16:24.740 never really take the time to reflect on the place you now occupy in a causal chain of goodness that

00:16:31.480 really is saving lots of lives. Whereas maybe in that same day, and I kind of speak from experience

00:16:38.380 now, having compared these things in my life a lot, you might be on a walk and, you know, someone's got

00:16:46.620 a flat tire on their bicycle and you help them fix it, right? And so it's a 10-minute exchange with a

00:16:53.460 stranger, which is wholly positive. But when you look at what gladdens your mind at the end of the day,

00:17:01.480 it's going to be the fixed bicycle tire and that exchange much more than the check to the

00:17:07.780 organization that might have actually saved thousands of lives. And, you know, I'm obviously

00:17:14.000 not suggesting we should make a choice between those things because we're not forced to. But

00:17:18.620 it would be nice if the most meaningful things we did were almost by definition, the most rewarding

00:17:26.520 things we did. I mean, that's the kind of circle of incentives you wish you could achieve

00:17:32.840 psychologically, I think.

00:17:34.760 It's a great point. So what I'm thinking is the relationship between what you said and habituation.

00:17:40.480 So making out a check isn't something that sends a surprise signal to the human mind.

00:17:46.320 So it's something that people do, make out a check. So if you make out a check to pay your electricity

00:17:51.920 bill, that's the same act as making out a check, let's say, that will transform some number of

00:17:58.620 lives. And the act doesn't make you think, oh my gosh. And everything depends in terms of

00:18:05.960 our brain's alertness on whether there's a surprise signal or not. If you go and help some stranger

00:18:13.340 who's having a struggle with a bicycle or a struggle getting into a building or something,

00:18:17.680 that's probably the only time you did that that day or maybe that week or that decade.

00:18:23.380 Yeah, or that decade. And so the surprise signal is just a jolt of the best way. So if someone

00:18:31.740 says something that really amazes you that either hurts your feelings a lot or that makes you feel

00:18:39.800 great, then that's big in terms of your head. Not like you're going to get conceited,

00:18:46.780 but you're going to get rewarded. And that's part of it. It's also part of it is that there's

00:18:52.160 the personal, of course, we're wired to react to. So if you just send some check,

00:18:59.720 piece of paper that goes to 17 people, let's say you'll never meet, that's not going to

00:19:05.020 generate the same reaction as if you do something with one human being who looks you in the eye and

00:19:10.960 says, you know, thanks or I'm glad you're here.

00:19:14.480 Do you have any thoughts specific to midlife? I mean, if you're talking not to your 20-year-old

00:19:20.840 self, but to your mid-career self or your, let's say your 40, 45-year-old self, is there anything

00:19:26.560 that would have been important to communicate at that point?

00:19:30.440 Well, of course, I'm much younger than 40. So when I think of my 40-year-old self, I think that's

00:19:35.980 really an old guy, and I hope he can still run. I'm still waiting to see you in the NBA.

00:19:41.360 But I do know something about midlife crisis because we studied it for purposes of the book.

00:19:47.540 There are midlife crises all over the world, not everywhere, but in many nations. It's kind

00:19:54.500 of shocking. It's generality. And it happens at different ages, but it's the same phenomenon.

00:20:00.480 And we have a theory of what accounts for the midlife crisis. It's that once you are, let's

00:20:08.320 say, 40, it may be that life is really good, but nothing's changing. It's gray. So you have maybe a

00:20:16.500 partner or maybe a community. It's the same. You have a job. It's good. It's steady. You have a place

00:20:23.780 where you're living. That's kind of where you live. And this is a little like, I'm going to phrase it

00:20:29.200 very strongly, but a little like being dead in terms of the mind. When you're 20, you can fall

00:20:35.660 in love tomorrow. You can have your heart broken that night. You can learn something that's going

00:20:42.700 to completely reorient where you're going. You can think, now I'm going to go to a place, maybe in

00:20:50.140 the United States, maybe elsewhere that I've never been before. And my gosh, what would it be like to

00:20:55.920 see Los Angeles? Whereas if you're 40 or 50, the chance that you've seen Los Angeles is higher.

00:21:02.380 And the idea that Los Angeles is going to make you amaze the very prospect of Los Angeles,

00:21:08.540 that's just lower. So for people in midlife crises, it's often like you're in a world where you have

00:21:16.620 what you want. And there might be happiness, there might be meaning, I hope so, but psychological

00:21:23.460 richness might not be present. People who are older, by the way, when their kids have left,

00:21:29.920 maybe, they're not sure where they're going to live. They might take up a hobby. They might retire

00:21:35.600 and do something different. They might stay in their job and do something different. No good life

00:21:40.660 crisis anymore. The world is their oyster.

00:21:44.500 Hmm. Well, how much of that has to do with kids? You just sounded like you were celebrating the

00:21:49.560 empty nester phase. Well, there are a couple of things to say. So it turns out that taking care

00:21:56.620 of small kids, people do take a happiness hit. They might have a meaning boost, but happiness goes

00:22:06.160 down. And one thing about taking care of kids is there are lots of surprises. And so habituation is

00:22:14.460 less likely. Keep in mind, habituation is diminished sensitivity to a stimuli that stays constant or

00:22:21.600 changes very slowly. I have an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old, and there are lots of surprises.

00:22:28.680 They're not like two-year-olds and four-year-olds, so it's not like that, but there are lots of

00:22:33.760 surprises. For people who have empty nest, there are, along one dimension, more surprises for many,

00:22:43.140 meaning you can do whatever you want now. You can travel. You can go to Munich if you want,

00:22:51.600 if you have the resources. And if you don't have the resources, you can take a little vacation an

00:22:56.800 hour away maybe and see a town that's charming and that you've never seen before. And the fact of

00:23:02.820 going and changing is in some ways more available to the empty nesters than to the nested.

00:23:10.280 Well, how does this relate to the connection between wealth and happiness? How do you think

00:23:16.000 about that? And there's a dichotomy, which at some point you discuss in your book, of experiences

00:23:22.760 versus things, being the things that one might get with wealth. What is wealth good for when we're

00:23:30.940 talking about human flourishing beyond, obviously, the basics of just not being poor and having to

00:23:36.740 deal with acute financial stress continuously? Okay. We know a lot about this, more probably than

00:23:44.260 humanity ever has. So as you say, being really poor is very bad. Everything gets worse. Weakens

00:23:54.220 that have stress in them are worse if you're poor. Something involving health is worse if you're poor.

00:24:00.780 Everything is worse, basically, population-wide if you're poor. The recent data suggests that

00:24:07.720 more money is just better. It's not hugely better, but it's definitely better, both in terms of how

00:24:15.020 well people evaluate their lives, asking how happy are you, and in terms of measured experience.

00:24:21.760 It keeps getting better up to, there may be a ceiling, but up to very large sums, people get happier.

00:24:30.100 Not a whole lot, but definitely happier with more money, except the bottom 20%. So the bottom 20%

00:24:38.660 in terms of happiness, they are not going to do better when they are earning $200,000 versus when

00:24:45.860 they're earning $90,000. They do do better, up to $70,000, by the way. But after that, if you're in

00:24:52.440 the bottom 20% in terms of happiness, the difference between $220,000 and $80,000 is basically zero.

00:24:59.880 And what's going on with them, we don't know exactly. But the most plausible account is if

00:25:05.760 you're suffering from, let's say, anxiety or bereavement or depression, to have $80,000 versus

00:25:13.720 $10,000, that's good. But to have $80,000 versus $200,000 doesn't matter a whole lot.

00:25:20.600 So wealth matters less to well-being, over $70,000 than one might think, but it is definitely a

00:25:29.100 positive. Having said that, suppose you have a pot of money you just get, some number of dollars,

00:25:36.380 let's say $500, do you want to spend that on getting a product, maybe a new laptop, maybe

00:25:43.500 a television, or do you want to spend it on an experience, maybe a night or two in some place?

00:25:50.760 Experiences tend to produce more happiness than products. And this is a little startling,

00:25:57.780 because a product, if you get a new TV, you can have that forever. If you have one or two nights away,

00:26:03.780 you just have that for one or two nights. The reason appears to be that people habituate

00:26:09.160 to products. So I have a new and better TV now. This is actually an autobiographical statement,

00:26:16.260 I do, than I did two years ago. But is my life better, even in terms of TV watching,

00:26:23.300 than it was with the old, pretty good TV? Not much. I habituate to the new, better TV.

00:26:29.160 With the experience, you have it, if it's short-term particularly, it's a boost for you,

00:26:38.000 and you remember it. So people don't habituate to experiences that are short-term for sure,

00:26:44.800 and they remember them. So you think of products as the gift that keeps on giving,

00:26:50.420 it's less true than intuition suggests. And you think of experience as ephemeral,

00:26:55.560 that's also less true than intuition suggests. Experiences are actually the gift that keep on

00:27:01.560 giving.

00:27:03.360 Yeah. Yeah. I guess there are probably some material objects that bridge those two things. I'm thinking

00:27:10.180 of something like having a great gym or something, something you use a lot, which actually changes you

00:27:17.080 as a person on some level, and it gives you a new sense of well-being or competence. Let's say you get

00:27:23.580 into cycling. Getting the bike that allows you to get into cycling is probably more than just a

00:27:29.540 product. It becomes a new hobby. And so there's maybe corner conditions where it looked like

00:27:35.020 exceptions here. But yeah.

00:27:36.480 Completely. Yeah.

00:27:37.340 Completely. I'm thinking as you talk that I actually joined a gym in DC, which I dearly love. I didn't

00:27:44.100 take up a new sport. I do my usual sport, which is squash. But my first days visiting that gym,

00:27:51.040 it's a nice gym, were over the moon. I was in love with the gym. I wanted to marry the gym.

00:27:57.320 And now I just really like the gym, but I don't have the feeling of astonishment. And that's what

00:28:06.180 the book is about. That's about habituation. And our conversation will make me more amazed at the gym

00:28:13.360 next time I go, which I hope is tomorrow, by virtue of the fact that I've reminded myself

00:28:18.520 that I get to go to a gym.

00:28:21.080 Well, again, the book is called Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There,

00:28:26.140 which you wrote with Talisha Rote. And she's quite a celebrated neuroscientist at, I believe,

00:28:32.860 both at MIT and University College London. So I want to just take a bridge from where we were to

00:28:39.420 some other concerns, which some of what you actually do, you do touch on some of this in

00:28:44.940 the book. There's a section on misinformation, and I think, conspiracy thinking. But one thing I'm

00:28:52.240 worried that we're getting habituated to is total dysfunction and toxic partisanship in our politics,

00:28:59.540 and just a failure to have a fact-based discussion about anything of consequence, given that our

00:29:09.480 entire population appears to be siloed into incompatible data sets with respect to, I mean,

00:29:15.840 most of this is happening on social media, but I guess it's even a bigger problem than that,

00:29:19.720 just in terms of the kinds of information sources that the various echo chambers consider to be

00:29:27.400 sources of information. And there's a very perverse effect here, where when you look at what

00:29:33.760 a government can do to respond to misinformation and conspiracy thinking, there's a kind of paradox,

00:29:41.780 because many of the most inflammatory pieces of misinformation, many of the most inflammatory

00:29:47.500 and polarizing conspiracy theories, relate to the government's very efforts to respond to

00:29:54.560 misinformation and conspiracy thinking. So anytime the government has reached out to a social media

00:30:00.400 organization trying to get them to dampen down some crackpot thesis that may well be getting people

00:30:06.200 killed, let's say during a pandemic, that is now exhibit A in the Orwellian overreach of our government

00:30:14.520 that suggests that the pandemic itself was entirely fake to some people, and just a pretext to seize

00:30:22.840 control of the levers of power. Give me your view of our current state of polarization and

00:30:30.620 discombobulation, and what are we going to do about it?

00:30:34.120 Okay, great. So let's talk about the habituation part. There's something called the illusory truth

00:30:40.420 effect, and I'm going to illustrate it right now. I'm not sure if you heard, Sam, that recently

00:30:46.520 Tom Brady announced he was going to cover it. If you'd like to continue listening to this

00:30:51.560 conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access

00:30:57.100 to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through

00:31:02.280 our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on

00:31:07.460 the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support,

00:31:12.660 and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - March 19, 2024

#359 — Getting Used to It

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript