Some people call the problem “hubris,” which makes it sound like it’s a problem stemming from conscious conceit. I see the problem as more insidious. The cause is completely silent and invisible, capable of toppling us in broad daylight even when we are trying to be step-by-step careful with our facts and analysis. Daniel Kahneman warned us ever so clearly in Thinking: Fast and Slow.

The silent process by which our thought-process falls off the rails is based on a cocktail that includes confirmation bias (evidence that conflicts with our view of the situation is invisible) and WYSIATI (We tend to focus on the thing in front of us to the exclusion of everything else). Jonathan Haidt warns us that the only way to protect ourselves from the confirmation bias is to engage with a heterodox crowd, constantly and enthusiastically subjecting ourselves to many viewpoints and perspectives, including those we find distasteful and sometimes even odious. Engaging with otherly others is the only way to protect ourselves from falling off the rails. The key is that you can’t merely pretend to listen to other viewpoints. You gain nothing by trying to simply look open-minded. You need to consciously entertain those viewpoints and to let those often distasteful challenge your deepest convictions.

I suspect that “hubris” mostly caused by the thought that although other people fall off the rails, we are immune because we are especially smart/careful/creative/self-critical. That overconfidence makes us vulnerable to massive intellectual failures that can only be seen by others, not by ourselves. Sam has been brilliant for many years on many topics. He has engaged with some of the most serious-minded people in the world on complex topics. The paradox is that even though his work serves him well as an intellectual gymnasium, it seems to have given him the false confidence that he was so good that there was no risk that he would fall off the rails. Maybe he assumed that his own impressive intellect (and it has been impressive) did its on self-critical thinking. It often did. But that is not enough. One cannot really also be one’s own critics, not day in and day out.

Choosing to test our views by subjecting them to views other other people that we find distasteful is John Stuart Mill 101. Those who fail to do this don’t understand the views of anyone else and they don’t even understand themselves. JSM: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

Sam Harris has been running through more than a few stoplights over the past few years. He has often become intensely personal in his attacks against extraordinarily thoughtful people such as Glenn Greenwald and Brett Weinstein. His recent decision to cancel his Twitter account also seems to be a personal attack aimed at Elon Musk’s quest to disband most of the censorship department at Twitter.  Sam’s recently-expressed hesitance about free speech, however, is a dangerous short-term myopic reaction. Sam didn’t appreciate it, but he needed more exposure to more viewpoints that challenged his own. He needed this strong medicine regarding his rigid views on CDC guidance re COVID, for example, something that he finally seemed to admit a few days ago on his visit with Bill Maher on the Club Random podcast.

We are all inconsistent in our views, no matter how hard we try to be perfectly accurate. We are talking apes who do the best we can under the disorienting situations in which we find ourselves here on planet Earth. The best we can do is to maintain a decent batting average. If we maintain a healthy sense of curiosity that leaves open the possibility that we are wrong and keep exposing ourselves to those who say we are wrong, that will minimize our changes of making big public errors.

In 2011, Sam wrote an excellent book called Lying that urged us to do everything in our power to avoid all lying, even white lies. His book deeply and personally challenged me because I am sometimes tempted to say something untrue out of expedience, to manipulate others, to avoid social awkwardness or to avoid the wrath of a tribe. It takes a hell of a lot of work to not lie, but Sam’s book offers simple powerful advice that paves the only road to long-term personal integrity.

But then Sam threw the core lesson of his excellent book into the dust when he said that it’s OK for the news media to lie to keep Donald Trump from being elected. That advice has probably gained him some admiration from some people, but it has more dramatically lost him followers and respect. That’s what should happen to those who sell out on their red principles.  I understand the short-term expediency of his opinion that it’s OK for the media to lie when the threat of Trump is looming–he doesn’t want to become the laughingstock Kant became (in my eyes) when he urged that we be honest with a man who asks us where to find a person he wants to murder.  Kant urged that we must always tell the truth.  Sam, who urged that we must always tell the truth, made an exception in the case of the media’s failure to report on Hunter Biden’s Laptop, invoking a barrage of comments on Twitter that Harris has become afflicted with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).

Through his embrace of censorship, Sam has, in effect, urged that some people should not be able to tell their truths.  For instance, in his uncritical embrace of the CDC’s meandering COVID “truths” over the past few years, Sam has elevated fear over truth, inviting fear to be a veto of the truth process.  Even though Jonathan Rauch has made airtight argument for free speech in his critically important book, The Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch emphasizes that truth is a never-ending process, that no one should be the ultimate authority and that no one gets the final say (pp 88-89).

The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else’s fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’ errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based. The Constitution of Knowledge

The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.

Free speech is not merely a nice idea. It is the bedrock principle upon which the United States was founded. It is the main reason Sam was in a position to talk freely for decades in ways that would have caused him to be burned at the stake in many other countries.

We need to be ever vigilant bout the evils of censorship. Censorship is perhaps the most dangerous form of lying, because it is disguised as an action. Censorship is the false claim that there is no other side to the story. Or it’s a false claim that any challenge to the prevailing narrative is BS before we even hear it.

So sorry to see that Sam Harris, who articulated the best arguments against lying, has now gone soft on truth-telling. He lost sight of his first principles. He was the victim of those silent thought-killers, the confirmation bias and WYSIATI.

My thoughts echo the thoughts of many others, including Holly Math Nerd, who wrote this excellent essay: “The End of Faith…in Sam Harris: Requiem for a former hero.” Holly’s essay offers many of the details about Sam’s current struggle. Her final words include these:

I am, and will always be, grateful to the person who wrote Letter to a Christian Nation and Lying. But that person is dead.

Trump broke his brain.

Some combination of his own ego and fear of his own mortality broke his soul.

If I believed in any gods, I would pray for his resurrection.

[Added Dec 2, 2022]

I just finished listening to Sam Harris, Making Sense, #304: “Why I Left Twitter.” I think I can see even better where I part ways with Sam on free speech. He is frustrated that everyone on Twitter has profiles and tweets that look the same, yet some of those people offer tweets of substance yet other offer vile, moronic, combative low-value or no-value information. I agree with that. Same wants us to be able to find high quality information. He suggests that those who have done real thinking often display this credibility with better quality coherent websites. Also, he suggests that people should rely on more credible sources of information, for instance, institutions. I’m paraphrasing this and it is my bottom line understanding of Sam’s concern. I agree with all of this.

The devil is in the details, however. How do we know who is providing credible high-quality information when lots of charlatans have slick-looking websites and many of our institutions are being eaten out from the inside by ideologues, including news media, government offices and universities, who have become thoroughly drenched in Woke ideology? How should people know the difference, Sam, now that even you have admitted that the CDC has destroyed much of its credibility with sustained disinformation for the past several years? CDC misinformation like this. Same problem for many of our other institutions, which have earned my distrust and my wrath. Should we just suck it up and trust untrustworthy institutions (and sophisticated looking websites)? Jonathan Rauch rightly upholds the importance of our sense-making institutions, because they have historically given us a credible alternative to listening to know-nothings who blather on social media. But we can no longer trust many of our institutions.

The alternative is that those who disagree speak out freely. They should not be censored. Stupid claims will be contested vigorously and if the good guys aren’t winning, that speaks to much bigger concerns, such as the piss-poor educations many Americans are subjected to. Sam is not big on opening up the conversation on Twitter to allow everyone free voice within the context of what is allowed by the First Amendment. I suspect that he was for censoring voices who disagreed with the CDC on COVID, even though we now know that the CDC was wrong on many things, often dangerously wrong. Censorship never works. It feels good to those in power, but it has failed every time it has been tried. If that is what Sam wants Twitter to do, he needs to decide who shall be the censor?

I trust no one to be the censor. Everyone falls off the rails some of the time, including Sam Harris, as he did with COVID and as he is now doing with his willingness to allow the media to lie in order to swing an election to Sam’s preferred candidate. I also preferred Biden to Trump, but I considered both of these candidates to be ghastly. But I would never approve of the news media lying to us and withholding relevant information from us.