#378 — Digital Delusions

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

🗓️ 2 August 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Renée DiResta about the state of our information landscape. They discuss the difference between influence and propaganda, shifts in communication technology, influencers and closed communities, the asymmetry of passion online and the illusion of consensus, the unwillingness to criticize one's own side, audience capture, what we should have learned from the Covid pandemic, what is unique about vaccines, Renée's work at the Stanford Internet Observatory, her experience of being smeared by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, Elon Musk and the Twitter files, the false analogy of social media as a digital public square, the imagined "censorship-industrial complex," the 2024 presidential election, 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. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll also find our
0:24.9	scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We
0:29.0	don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:34.0	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, did you see Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists?
0:52.0	That was spectacular. As you probably know it went off the rails at the first question, which in Trump's defense, it was a very hard-hitting question.
1:04.8	I didn't catch a journalist's name.
1:06.3	She was from ABC News, but she was great.
1:10.3	And Trump performed like a robot that it had its racial software updated somewhere around 1972,
1:20.0	about the time that Archie Bunker was the most famous character on television.
1:25.0	His cluelessness and probably actual racism was just leaking out of his pores in that context. And it was fascinating to watch.
1:38.0	I would point out, however, that the man spoke with reasonable fluidity, despite the absolutely bizarre hand gestures, is a very different
1:47.6	near octogenarian than President Biden.
1:51.4	We should be very grateful that Biden is no longer in the race.
1:56.3	And from what I've seen, Vice President Harris has responded, well, I'll remind you this was an event where in front of, I assume, an exclusively black audience,
2:08.0	Trump questioned whether the Vice President was actually black,
2:12.0	and in fact, claimed that she had only just
2:14.2	turned black having previously identified as an Indian her entire life.
2:18.8	Of course none of that's true, but true or not.
2:23.0	It was an amazing thing to allege in that context.
2:26.7	Anyway, it seems like Harris has responded well to this
2:29.6	by just letting surrogates respond. She has just laughed. just
2:34.0	laughed it off,
	...

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