Welcome to the Making Sense podcast.

This is Sam Harris.

Okay, well, I seemed to have conocated Twitter cancer last week.

It was probably Facebook and Instagram cancer too, but I don't look at those platforms.

Anyway, I was on someone else's podcast and said some things about Trump and Biden.

Those statements produced a fair amount of outrage in a very large group of people.

So I think there are a few points I should clarify.

There's nothing of real substance to walk back, but the truth is I wasn't speaking very

clearly or systematically on that podcast.

And in one place, I actually misspoke.

And as a result, there seemed to be a few significant misunderstandings that have gotten

amplified.

I tried to clarify a few of these points on Twitter, knowing that I would be doing a little

more than spitting the wind.

I still think it was probably good to attempt this and to do it quickly because several

of the articles that I've written about the episode noticed those tweets, and so they

didn't spread precisely the same misunderstandings.

Of course, some people noticed my effort to clarify things and rejected it.

At moments like this, I'm always reminded of Nietzsche's aphorism.

That when you force people to change their mind about you, they hold the effort you

cost them very much against you.

This really does seem to be true, and it's pretty maladaptive.

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