#365 — Reality Check

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris begins by remembering his friendship with Dan Dennett. He then speaks with David Wallace-Wells about the shattering of our information landscape. They discuss the false picture of reality produced during Covid, the success of the vaccines, how various countries fared during the pandemic, our preparation for a future pandemic, how we normalize danger and death, the current global consensus on climate change, the amount of warming we can expect, the consequence of a 2-degree Celsius warming, the effects of air pollution, global vs local considerations, Greta Thunberg and climate catastrophism, growth vs degrowth, market forces, carbon taxes, the consequences of political stagnation, the US national debt, the best way to attack the candidacy of Donald Trump, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
0:18.0	In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org.
0:24.0	There you'll also find our scholarship program,
0:26.2	where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one.
0:28.9	We don't run ads on the podcast,
0:30.8	and therefore it's made possible entirely
0:32.3	through the support of our subscribers.
0:34.0	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, my friend Dan Dennett died about 10 days ago. I was traveling and then I got sick and couldn't record so I'm just now getting an
0:57.0	opportunity to say a few things about him. As I'm sure all of you know
1:01.4	Dan was an extraordinarily productive philosopher.
1:05.0	He really distinguished himself among philosophers by taking science seriously.
1:10.0	This is evident throughout his books, but his book, Darwin's dangerous idea in which he argues
1:17.5	that Darwin's notion of natural selection was simply the best idea anyone has ever had is really a wonderful bridge between philosophy
1:26.3	and science.
1:27.3	And it's among many that Dan built.
1:31.3	One often hears philosophy as a discipline denigrated, especially by scientists and technologists,
1:38.0	and there's even an implicit denigration in some of Dan's work, and in some of mine as well. I think it's worth clarifying this.
1:47.0	Dan often approached philosophy as a kind of handmaiden to science,
1:52.0	and he was definitely not alone in doing this. On this view the
1:56.6	chief purpose of philosophy is to clear up conceptual confusion and to spot the many forms of learned error and well-trained
2:07.4	ignorance that develop even in science so that we can get on with the work of
2:11.8	actually understanding the world.
	...

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