This Sunday, we had a fun, ad-hoc conversation on Twitter Spaces. We covered Sam Harris, vaccine safety, lab leak, Trump, bioweapons, mRNA technology, malthusianism, and all the way back to Sam Harris: ethics, institutional corruption, the problem of scale. We had a lot fun in this laid back conversation, I hope you enjoy it too!
Outline:
0:00 @alexandrosm intro
0:25 @proofofworkshow enters
1:00 The Sam Harris dishing begins
3:10 Alex: Eric Weinstein defended Sam Harris
4:48 Sam on Hunter Biden’s laptop
6:04 Alex: It’s Brave New World, really
7:21 Jeff: Let’s make this clear, listeners: Trump is a scumbag
8:07 Alex: Could never support anybody who’d let Fauci run the pandemic response
12:00 Alex: Mike Nayna insight on institutional collapse
14:54 Alex’s diner: “We don’t have creamer due to supply chain disruptions”
17:35 Alex: Sam said those things without any guns pointed at him
17:40 @SmoothJohnny5 enters
18:11 “It wasn’t a liberal conspiracy because Liz Cheney was involved” Sam
19:10 President Gator is working on a Substack about Scott Adams—“emotionally true”
20:30 “We’ll hold a democratic vote to stop the asteroid”
22:28 @RokoMijic enters
23:40 None of the elites believe in democracy—it’s too dangerous
25:00 Sam Harris is quite good at digging to the bottom of a topic
26:55 Trump is a lazy, quasi-mobster businessman type who found some resonance with redneck Americans—not fit to lead the entire human civilization
27:55 A Trump wildcard is he’s the one who raised the China issue
29:12 Knack for wheeling and dealing lets you see conflict
29:54 Sam Harris disappointing because he’s always been an idol to Rocco
30:31 Everything Sam’s said on the pandemic has been garbage
31:05 Covid exposed Taleb as well
32:36 What is the current state of affairs re: vaccine safety?
32:50 Look at massive Nordic study.
33:10 Serious side effects—we don’t know why—our model is wrong
34:15 Pervasive censorship, worldwide—have to throw out all the data
35:00 Enough information to make us concerned
35:55 Paper about mRNA found in lymph nodes up to 60 days
37:45 Multiple countries reporting drop in births, life insurance companies reporting excess death in young people
39:15 Silent horror. Wish some rationalists would dig into the data
39:46 We need to get the bottom, but hard to keep up with the info—needs to be investigated
41:41 Lab leak: market origin hypothesis failing
43:17 China has backed off market origin story—they’re pointing at the US
43:50 Origin matters because biggest event in people’s lives—if it really was a leak and was covered up, that should increase our prior to question everything else we’ve been told i.e. vaccines
46:06 The people looking into it have moved on from the question “was it.” There’s so much evidence. The real debates in lab leak land are which lab? When? How? Why?
48:00 @TomBeakbane enters
48:08 Jeffrey Sachs interview with RFK jr lays it all out
49:41 The Normie narrative is there needs to be a war, like war on climate, war on extremists, or Putin, or the virus—that’s what’s driving the craziness we see online, including Sam Harris
51:32 The politics of existential threats
52:23 RFK jr podcast details
54:20 @april_harding enters
54:30 Research was for offensive bioweapon that could be deployed to inflict economic damage on the target—vaccine would protect your population
55:18 Malone said same thing: build weapon and vaccine together
56:08 My problem with this hypothesis is this would crash the world economy
57:53 @dopaminergic13 enters
58:05 Singapore/French perspective on the lab thing “There’s a French dimension not being talked about in the US'“
1:01:15 September 2019, the French President was made aware of a hack at a French-built P4 biolab sometime in 2019 (they’re not sure when) Lab workers got sick
1:03:10 Everyone should be looking at Fort Detrick and Ralph Baric
1:03:27 Baric also probably involved in developing the vaccines and Remdesivir
1:04:09 Video clip of Ralph Baric getting vacinated cut before needle inserted
1:05:10 @JoceylynnPearl enters
1:05:31 She’s been working on mRNA therapies for a decade
1:06:40 The promise was always that mRNA was transient—why boosters are essential
1:07:45 Designing and manufacturing is a much shorter process than traditional vaccine
1:08: Claim was that it was done in a weekend—can’t be true, right?
1:10:53 Sequence was uploaded and field went to work around the clock
1:12:44 What might be the mechanism in myocarditis damage?
1:13:42 Two hypotheses Alex has heard
1:16:17 Omicron boosters will be bivalent
1:17:00 Discussion on LMPs
1:19:08 Discussion of Shakey’s YouTube Channel , history of eugenics and population control
1:20:16 Twitter user asks how Sanisdap’s going. It’s going!
1:23:45 @everybodyshook enters
1:24:25 Jeff wants Shakey’s take on birthrate numbers
1:25:11 Shakey talks about his primary area of research being resource development and science—describes Malthusianism, his main focus
1:28:37 It’s hard to call population control a conspiracy theory when there are 3000 conferences with countries around the world
1:29:08 @NawrasDiaa enters
1:29:54 Takes conversation back to Sam Harris justifying hiding the truth from the population
1:32:36 Alex: The thing I was highlighting was Sam’s hypocrisy—not whether his position is reasonable or not
1:40:19 The is/ought argument of Sam Harris
1:41:10 Choosing the lesser of two evils—TV show 24 as an example “Everyone roots for Jack Bauer”
1:42:26 What about the consequences of breaking the law? Of breaking down institutional trust?
1:42:44 The old children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie—cascade of effects
1:43:40 Once you allow lying in your agency, you lose the honest people
1:44:38 Sam’s morality model
1:45:19 Coherent extrapolated volition
1:47:51 Does this mean that the concept is wrong? Emergency room triage—impossible decision within parameters we have
1:49:10 Sam is talking about triaging the Universe
1:49:49 The problem with rationalism
1:51:08 What emerges is something like principalism
1:51:53 Can lead to complete paralysis
1:54:00 I should decide what I should do for myself. I should propose to others cooperative foundations
1:55:30 We want cooperation. We want trust. Trust in institutions, organizations, etc. Sam is doing the opposite of generating trust in institutions.
1:56:00 In the pandemic, they wasted the one resource they had, which was the public’s trust. Congratulations, you’ve saved masks, you’ve lost humanity.
1:57:57 A Hitler quote: a great leader is never elected
1:58:55 Average people don’t know what’s best for them, but the elites don’t know either
2:01:10 Doesn’t matter who you put in office, country is run by vast bureaucracy that’s been there for decades. Anthony Fauci has been in his position for 38 years.
2:02:56 We’re not electing Emperors, we’re electing a chief bureaucrat
2:02:02 If the track record of these people is so bad, they have no right to lead. Just because somebody came out of Harvard or Yale is not an anointment by god to be the ruling class
2:05:53 You don’t come out like Anthony Fauci holding the lives of billions in your hands and being glib about what is going on. They lied and killed a bunch of social media accounts of people who were correct to get what we wanted. Sam says it was warranted
2:07:32 Joe Norman says the problem is scale—need tiny, tiny systems
2:08:28 Morality always has a point of view
2:09:15 We could have listened to Jay Bhattacharya instead of Rochelle Walensky. There were better people but the problem is the machine is broken
2:10:12 Wrap up
Dig Your Own Rabbit Hole August 21, 2022: Sam Harris, Vaccines, Lab Leak, Ethics and so much more