My daughters and I just finished watching a excellent new film: "My Octopus Teacher." Stunning camera work, calming, educational and an enchanting story. It was a great change of pace to everything that has ailed us for the past 12 months. On Netflix.
I thought the lab hypothesis was debunked based on many articles I've seen over the months, but here are two people I respect (based upon their Darkhorse Podcast), Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, suggesting that the lab hypothesis needs to be rigorously investigated because they've noticed more than a few red flags. They further argue that until now, the lab hypothesis has been debunked based on social stigma rather than scientific investigation.
From "Ideas that Changed my Life,"by Morgan House:
Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.
It takes conscious effort to know what is happening outside of ourselves because we only have our own eyes to see and our own ears to hear. Further, we are the heroes of our own story and we are always working overtime for our own PR department, whether on Facebook or otherwise.
Human intelligence is incredibly useful but it doesn’t safeguard you against having false beliefs, because that’s not what intelligence is for. Intelligence is associated with coming up with more convincing bullshit and with being a better liar, but not associated with a better ability to recognizeone’s own bias. Unfortunately, intelligence has very little influence on your ability to rationally evaluate your own beliefs, or undermine what’s called “myside bias.”
Daniel Kahneman offers additional insight about why our personal world seems to be "the" world. He calls it "What you see is all there is." It's like those automobile side mirrors that make it seem that objects in our mirror are closer than they are. Our own perceptions repeatedly fill our limited ability to attend to "the world." Our personal perceptual stream thus becomes "the world." I've described this as an "illusion of fullness," a cognitive illusion for those fail to engage in perceptual and intellectual humility.
Which brings us back to the opening quote by Morgan House. It takes conscious effort to overcome WYSIATI and, when we fail to do put forth this conscious, we inevitably overgeneralize in our ignorant overconfidence.
On January 5, Sam Harris kicked off his newest season of his podcast, Making Sense, with an episode he titles "A Few Thoughts for a New Year. He covers a lot of ground in 30 minutes. I wish I could say that I disagree with him on any of the major points he is making. His main concern is that we seem to be losing grasp of our ability to work together to solve the problems we face as a country.
As always, Sam articulates his concerns precisely and he avoids taking political sides. His focus for the coming year is seeking real life solutions for the many pressing issues he touches in this podcast. I highly recommend listening in. If you can't afford it, he offers subscriptions without cost. Simply listen to the end of this episode for details.
Excellent discussion by Coleman Hughes. The introduction ends at Minute 2:25. Here's the key take-away (4:25):
"The point isn't to avoid noticing race, which is impossible. The point is to notice race and then disregard it as a reason to treat people differently and as a category on which to base public policy."
I'll conclude with a few more excerpts from the video:
Another source of confusion that I try to avoid and will avoid in this talk is the misleading word post-racial. The “post” in post-racial suggests that there are two separate eras: a racial era characterized by the presence of racism and a post-racial era characterized by its absence, and the only question is which era we are currently living in, because colorblindness in this framework would only make sense during the second racism-free era.
Many critics of colorblindness have dismissed it on the grounds that we're not there yet which is to say we have not yet eliminated racial prejudice and they're right about that. Racism still exists. Racial prejudice still exists and probably will always exist, to some extent. But they frame the issue upside down. Colorblindness is not a synonym for the absence of racism. I's an ideology created to fight racism.
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It would appear that virtually everyone has unanimously rejected color blindness as a backwards value, an old-fashioned out-of-date way of maintaining the white supremacist status quo. Yet even as it has become virtually taboo among elites colorblind policies continue to dominate in the court of public opinion especially on the issues of hiring and college admissions. In 2019, the pew research center asked people whether employers should only take a person's qualifications into account even if it results in less racial diversity and 74 percent of Americans agreed that agreed with that statement. Not only did a majority of Americans as a whole agree with this statement of colorblind hiring even at the expense of diversity, a majority of each individual racial group, whites, Blacks and Hispanics, also agreed with this message. Roughly the same percentage agreed that colleges should not consider race in admissions.
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The extent of the attacks on color blindness is sometimes surprising. For example, the best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi in his latest book, “How to be an Anti-Racist,” says “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right's unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular Americans’ drive for a race neutral one.” So yeah, to say that colorblindness is wrong-headed is one thing. To say it is worse than the alt-right is quite another. It's impossible to understand the hatred directed at colorblindness without first understanding critical race theory this was an intellectual movement that originated at Harvard Law School in the 1980s.
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[Min 41]
If you take a Martin Luther King quote and you just say it verbatim you may get cancelled if you're white, even if you're Black, frankly. The strange thing about Dr King is we all venerate him--nobody ever speaks ill of him--but also he's basically ignored. He's in this uncanny valley where he is not exactly canceled but he's also not listened to, which is a strange place to be in. It speaks to the moral authority and credibility that we feel his message has. The awkwardness of acknowledging that, the main thrust of anti-racist activism, is exactly the opposite of what he stood for. That's a very awkward thing for the anti-racist movement to acknowledge, because they would lose some moral credibility if they outright said what is true, which is that we reject Dr King's goal. That's the truth but that can't be said out loud.
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[Min 44]
I've read hundreds of pages of Martin Luther King’s speeches and writings and virtually every three or four pages there is something that if said today you would be cancelled for. That's just the truth. It’'s trivially easy to find 20 Martin Luther King quotes expressing the colorblind ethic in the simplest terms and very difficult to find any quotes of him expressing that race is a crucial aspect of your identity to dwell upon and affirm.