Sam Harris is a person whose content I’ve dipped in and out of over the years. Initially back in the early 2000s I read End of Faith and got on the so called New Atheist train but lost interest with shooting fish in a barrel.
For a long time he unfortunately got lumped in with a bunch of rightwing ghouls but over the past few years has publicly disowned idiots like Ben Shapiro et al and got off Twitter.
For a decent period now my consumption has been exclusively his meditation app Waking Up which is extremely good, easily the best resource for what could broadly be called Buddhist derived philosophy and self discovery.
Here’s where the contradictions start. If you interact with his content and curation via Waking Up you find a very compassionate, articulate guy that has incredibly insightful conversations with some of the most interesting people in that world… rock over to his Making Sense podcast and there’s still the tail of his worse impulses in the 2010s. The contrast is pretty startling on the surface.
But after spending a decent amount of time with his philosophical positions some of his remaining extreme views on Abrahamic religions makes sense but it still feels like the guy spends too much time arguing with people on the margins.
For me a caveated Not Crap for the work and positions he expresses on Waking Up, but he makes it really difficult with content on Making Sense…
Public figure - Sam Harris
1clocker bob may 30, 2006 wrote:I think the possibility of interbreeding between an earthly species and an extraterrestrial species is as believable as any other explanation for the existence of George W. Bush.
