My Live Blog
I think the main issues should be the rates of change/evolution at the net societal level. This means some groups can go much faster. They can explore and test. Others can go much slower. But what matters is, in general, what can be commonly agreed upon as a safe and effective mean rate of change, and what the distribution of these changes should look like.
My Steelman of Peterson’ Position
Peterson believes that evolution has selected for a set of beliefs that are deeply coded in the human psyche via Darwin machines/heuristics many of which produce an operalization in the form of religious meta-truthful stories. It is important for people to be connected to these deep narratives in a way that maintains essential tensions. Pure rationality risks eschewing these tensions, not through malice, but through unintended commission and hubris. Hyper-rationality risks becoming too far removed from evolutionary grounding. If we will always recreate a de facto god-like ideal due to the inescapable role of hierarchy why don’t we just accept this and ensure it is grounded in evolutionary robust lessons which can change at a rate that is survivable by modern societies.
My Steelman of Harris’ Position
Rationality is the only solid base upon which communication can build. Religion necessarily introduces a manipulable appeal to authority structure which can be and has been coo-opted for nefarious ends. While the lesson’s of religion are indeed useful and have indeed been shaped by evolutionary forces and selection, useful myths are not necessary. Furthermore they purposefully obfuscate reality preventing people from investigating and deducing what is really happening. Religion and meta-truth is an unnecessary crutch. Anything religion can do and say can be done and said in a less supernatural and counter-factual way to the same end.
7:32
Peterson has framed Harri’s position as a technical philosophical issue concerning how to mediate between facts and values. He suggests Harris does this by an appeal to our fundamental ability to recognize truth (or perhaps to minimize obvious harm)
This obviously gets into the fitness landscape issue brought up in Vancouver 2. Sometimes things have to get temporarily worse before they can get permanently better. This obviously raises consequentialism or utilitarian issues (I’m not well versed enough on ethical philosophy to meaningfully tease out distinctions here).
My personal preference is to avoid this type of technical philosophy. It reminds me of how many angels on a pin head type question. Squaring the circle just isn’t as valuable as it may seem. This is because the bigger issue seems to be whether religion that is somewhat grounded in evolutionary lessons is more or less apt to get caught up in technocratically blind hubris than is Harris’ hyper-rationality. I think rationality has a better chance here, but its variance is much larger. Thus it is a riskier bet. However, I would probably accede that over a very long time, rationality works better. A 0.01% difference over a thousand generations is pretty substantial. Thus, if you’re not too concerned about how deep the local wells are, you’re probably better off with rationalism. I suspect the issue is that religion is almost certain to get to the same places as rationality, albeit in a slower way, and with less chance of catastrophically deep well.
This is not an obvious position. Religion is usually seen as archaic, arbitrary, and purposefully confrontational (due to its strong in-group out-group gradients). I just don’t think that applies to modern religion (which excludes most forms of anti-pluralistic fundamentalism). I think moderate religions (say, united church) and pluralistically oriented, moderately fundamentalistic religions (say, mormonism) are much less confrontational and more pluralistic than most progressivist secular, ethically bound groups.
7:40
Peterson - It isn’t obvious to him how to present Harris’ hyper-rational ethics in a way that is motivating to people and grips a society.
I’d agree. I think Harris’ approach is very appealing to a small percentage of people. I think this percentage will increase over time. Societies are become less religious. But it is not obvious that they are becoming more rational.
If your ethical foundation is not appealing enough, in a large population, competition means someone will come up with something that is more engaging. If your society isn’t firmly rooted in some endearing moralities, this can go very wrong.
12:00 - 14:00
Murray talks about Jesus smuggling - bringing in religion at the point your opponent is weakest. I think Harris does a good job suggesting that his issue is not this, but hidden contagion. If you allow for any useful myth (practical but not factual truth), your system eventually gets corrupted.
Perhaps I’m just too much of a pragmatist, but this strikes me as philosophically true but practically wrong. It’s also why I consider utopianism to be Harris’ Achilles heel. Perfect guides are always corrupted by imperfect interpreters. Harris places rationalism as a directionally good-enough refiner. This is probably true on a long-enough timescale, but I’m not sure we will necessarily survive the dips and valleys that are likely to come with rationalism’s malignant exploitation. This is especially true if the rate of change is so fast that gene-cultural factors don’t have time to stabilize in the population at a rate sufficient to accommodate such re-mooring. I think rationalistic ethics are just too easy to exploit for nefarious ends. Of course, so too is religion. But religion has at least been with us long enough so that people are very adept and sophisticated in spotting (explicitly or implicitly) its abuse. If you think Tele-evangelists are an obvious counter-point to this, just image how bad the same population might fare with the worst iterations of scientific racism or scientific ultranationalism… These positions don’t necessarily have redemption components nor moderating ying-yang tensions.
15:28
Harris has just said that magic doesn’t lose any of its intrigue or value even if you know it’s fake. Peterson’s rejoinder is that he is not so sure he knows which parts are fake and which aren’t. I think the placebo literature here is pretty interesting. For some things the placebo effect works and works for fairly long periods of time. For other things it doesn’t. Belief may have corollary benefits that don’t necessarily reproduce without it. One of those may be insatiable curiosity (at a broader population percentage than pure rationalism can muster). It may also produce a sense of humility that isn’t necessarily accomplished to the same extent amongst the same spread of the population as rationalism. These are things that should be studied. We can’t just assume they work for one side or the other. I suspect Peterson may go here, but he also seems to be taking a much more conciliatory role with Harris. I think after his first two phone interviews with Harris, Peterson is much more aware of how riled up and fixated Harris can get, and I think Peterson is deliberately avoiding this. It is just too easy for him to go to the exact same place, producing nothing of value.
SWITCHED to THIS VIDEO
17:10
Peterson just made the case that Harris’ ideal isn’t a destination, but a trajectory. Basically, anything that improves our state is what we are after. We are not after a certain Platonic? ideal.
I suspect Peterson’s follow up argument will be that trajectory based value systems have to worry about going in the wrong direction. This is gets at issues between local and global fitness landscapes. If there is no outside arbiter, and not enough ways to adequately measure “better”, up can become down.
I think this is a very strong point. I’m sure this arises from Peterson’s study of early 20th century tolitalitarianism. The issue becomes even more pronounced when an entire system loses touch with “reality” and Mandarin technocracy loses any of its grounding tethers. Normally periodic commoner revolutions re-tether things. But what do you do in a system where the tethers are designed not to exist? Or the tethers have be broken by denying the utility of evolutionary based moral goods? Can we not convince ourselves of anything?
Really interesting to see the parallels between Harris’ and Peterson’s arguments.
17:20
Harris’ rejoinder. Time to see if I was right. I suspect Harris will dodge the untethering issue. He will most likely say that rationality combined with free thought enables anyone to challenge the group-thought / technocratic Mandarin trap.
19:40
Peterson took a much less confrontational track toward Harris than I imagined. Instead of hitting the “untethering” issue directly, he makes the case that a directional approach to good and bad in, when you drop metaphysical baggage, the very fundamentals of Christianity.
20:40
I quite like how Peterson brings in the purpose of embodiment. I suspect Harris will say that embodiment is probably fine. What is problematic is that embodiment always incorporates error. Analogies are never perfect. What religion seems to do is to focus too much on the supernatural, i.e. the “errors” at the expense of correct underlying truth.
21:15
Seems like I accurately predicted Harris’ response. “Is the flesh made of dogmatism and supernaturalism and other worldliness? Historically it has been. And that has been the problem with religion. If you denude it with everything that in unjustifiable with 21st science, what you get down to is something more universal and less provincial than christianity per se”
22:00 - 23:20
Peterson talks about all the things, like art, drama, music, etc that are spandrel led in the “instantiation” of the expression of moralized directionality. He is uncertain if rationality can reproduce such richness. I would agree. I think the criticism though, is that such richness enables a lot of erroneous folk ideas to infiltrate religion’s central message. For instance, tile work which replaces the gaucheness of images starts to be seen as conveying some true moral value. I can see some strained ways in which this might be true, especially for really intelligent people. However, this seems to leverage natural human tendencies to mythologize and associate meaning with fairly arbitrary things that are not central to a process and indeed may be counter-productive to it or larger frames in which those actions exist. However, human evolutionary history has selected for this type of error (false positives) because they are less costly than assuming something with no direct value actually has no long term value (false negative). I think the elaborate processing ceremonies on South America cassava production versus African cassava production reflect this tension. (SA ritualizes the process. It is safe. Africa streamlines the process which is unsafe).
27:15
Murray does the perfect job as a host - “the worry of accepting the Peterson or the Murray position (on repeating Judaeo-Christian roots) is that is softens up the ground for “Jesus Smuggling” by others, even if we aren’t doing it”.
29:00-31:00
Harris uses a very good example on constructing meaning from clearly fake things like tarot cards. You don’t have to lie about the mechanism.
This is yet another thing that is true in principal and fairly incorrect in practice. For some people (probably a small percentage), no physical device/sign is needed. Yet clearly for most people most of the time, this is clearly incorrect. Even something known as fake brings in a physicality that makes the experience more meaningful. This is especially true if the physical signals resonate with the message itself. A high degree of resonance across multiple mediums and layers is deeper than one that isn’t. It has less chance of being substantially wrong. Why? I’m not entirely sure and don’t think some ex post facto BS would make the answer any more meaningful..
31:04
Seems like Peterson is taking the same position I am. Perhaps he has an answer to the “why”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he does…
Great Reference
Don D Hoffman cog scientist - our mind is evolved to get things wrong in fairly specific ways
39:90
Harris - “The fact that we can even talk about the possible fitness advantage of partially wrong ideas over factually truthful ideas demonstrates that we have a larger picture of what is in fact true. This is what religion gets wrong.”
Initially this struck me as a very strong point. But thinking about how I would respond to this, I’m not sure it is very strong at all. I’m not sure what this actually implies. It sounds very good rhetorically, but I just don’t see what type of truth Harris alludes to here? Is he simply saying we can distinguish between useful myths and factual truths?
I think the “rate of change” argument handles Harris’ comments. What matters is that the rate of societal change doesn’t exceed the group’s ability to cohere and survive during such change.
I also suspect Peterson’s earlier point about “not being entirely certain what is maladaptive or unnecessary myth and what isn’t” is apropos here. Harris is making a point about something that is somewhat easy to distinguish, factual and practical reality - in theory, and things that aren’t, subtle value judgments whose causal effects may be hopelessly chaotic over most every time period.
43:00
Harris - “It is as simple as ‘values are merely facts about the experience of conscious creatures”
I can’t say I agree with this at all. It strikes me as incredibly authoritarian. For this to not be authoritarian, you would have to have info about aggregate group level experiences, none of which are necessarily applicable to any individual. The easy way to understand this in in terms of what population level ‘facts’ say about individuals. Nothing at all.
53:00
Peterson was just challenged on whether he believed that stupid people need myth because they can’t do rationality. Normally people would retreat away from this. I quite like how Peterson has no quibbles engaging with this idea despite its normally awful appearances. This is very much one of the things we are talking about when we say society may need some degree of metaphorical (or practically adaptive truth) in order to cohere and stay cohered. Although I certainly think IQ is putting things much too narrowly. Nonetheless, here is where Peterson’s penchant for always thinking about the uncomfortable areas of his ideas lifts him up. He can immediately engage with the essence of the idea instead of hanging to give an appearance of retreat which undermines his actual position. Love him or hate him, it makes for good and engaging rhetoric.
54:40
Peterson finally mentions, albeit briefly, with the issue of rates of change. Seems like Murray thinks this is the big issue too.
56:00 - 57:00
Harris restates his superhero argument. He can tell his daughter that superheroes are in fact real and superheroness should be honoured.
I’m not sure how Peterson would confront this. My first instinct is to mythologize this and say that aspects of superheroness should in fact be respected. The exact embodiment is certainly variable, but there is a fundamental essence to… hero worship… that is probably needed for societal coherence and for many efficient forms of individual progress among many individuals.
58:15
Looks like Peterson and I are aligned in how we approach Harri’s superhero argument.
1:00:00
Interesting to see Harris acknowledge the importance of secular rituals. I think Harris and Peterson have both moved (or more likely are both more likely to feel comfortable in expressing the more moderate sides. I have to give both guys a lot of credit for keeping things very non-confrontational. I think Peterson’s therapeutic skills have certainly played a big role here).
1:09:00
Harris is again saying that the way of putting religious story into the explanation of meaning creates unnecessary conflicts and less-than-optimal
1:15:00
I am surprised at how much Harris is seemingly conceding here. I’ve never thought Harris was against any of these things. I just suspect he was much more fearful of a contagion model. That he is OK with ritual, story, etc, almost makes me think that the issue is one of power - who is making the stories, the rituals etc. If it is rational atheists, then presumably that would be fine. But in practice, I’m not so sure this would be true. Why? Over a couple of generations these things would almost certainly turn back into religion… The religion may certainly look and feel different, but then Peterson’s useful myth religion looks and feels different from the evangelical caricature Harris had initially taken it to be.
SUMMARY
1:30:00
I think the most powerful thing in this debate was Peterson’s rationale for why we are unable to know when radical Leftism becomes pathologic. I’ve heard him say this many times, but this time, the thing that really made it germane was his linkage of this fact with liberal tendencies to resist categorization and to always err on the side of compassion (of intent). Great summary.
I’d also suggest that this is the same problem Harris faces. When does hyper-rationalism go to far. What are the warning signs. How do we protect against its possible excesses? I think this is the main reason to keep it as an experiment for willing participants than as a mass movement to replace religion.
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