SIO266: Why Sam Harris Is Wrong about Police Killings
Serious Inquiries Only
Thomas Smith
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2020
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's been something like 70 years since the George Floyd protests, and the news cycle has had no choice but to move onto so many other huge and terrible things. But Lindsey Osterman and I still haven't forgotten the terrible arguments used by people like Sam Harris, and many in the right-wing information ecosystem, to push back against Black Lives Matter and to try to undermine the massive protests we saw. Lindsey takes us through two papers that have heavily influence this view, and why they're completely wrong. (spoiler: one was even RETRACTED!)
This episode was far more focused on the academic papers than on Sam Harris, but if you'd like to hear us absolutely destroy his "Can We Pull Back From the Brink" episode, make to become a Patron!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to? Serious inquiries only. |
| 0:10.0 | Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries only. This is episode 266. I'm Thomas and back with |
| 0:35.1 | me is Lindsey Osterman. How you do it? Really good. Yeah. Everything in my house is nice. That's |
| 0:41.3 | all I know about. I know. We, you know, that question should be stricken from the record in 2020. |
| 0:47.5 | I agree. Every podcast has to do it. But I should just say salutations. Hello. Greetings. |
| 0:53.6 | Greetings to you. You are on the show. Neutral statements. Yeah. Okay. I'm actually accurate. |
| 1:00.5 | So how do we explain what we're trying to do here? Well, as I said back when Lindsey first started |
| 1:06.7 | coming on the show, well, not first first, but started coming on the show of, I don't know, months |
| 1:10.8 | ago now, we had so many things we wanted to talk about. So many ways that I think her, her |
| 1:16.8 | scientific expertise could, could really help us break some things down. And this is one of those |
| 1:22.6 | things. Many listeners to the show likely used to be or maybe even still are listeners to the |
| 1:29.9 | Sam Harris podcast. He used to be a big influence on me back, I don't know, eight years ago, six years |
| 1:35.5 | ago, until in my opinion, he kind of lost it. If you heard that episode where he tried to do, |
| 1:41.6 | it's called, can we pull back from the brink? Well, I'm going to save my thoughts on it overall. |
| 1:48.0 | But the point is within that episode, and it's not just Sam Harris, this isn't just a reply to |
| 1:53.7 | Sam Harris because within the conservative kind of ecosystem, there was a response to the George |
| 2:00.4 | Floyd protests to the Black Lives Matter protests that I know we're all, we've all aged 70 years |
| 2:06.2 | in the last year. But do you remember when we had only aged about 35 years in the last year? |
| 2:11.3 | Yeah, I remember. In June, when we were all, I don't know, in our late 70s, |
| 2:18.8 | that those protests, obviously, were a huge deal. And in fact, |
| 2:23.7 | side note, even said at the time, there's no way we're going to be able to maintain all this |
| 2:27.4 | energy long enough to actually drive the reform that we need. And it's not any fault of ours. |
... |
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