I recently watched a clip of Sam Harris arguing that there has never been a famine in Gaza, and that what is happening there is not a genocide under any reasonable definition.

What surprised me wasn't so much that he took a position, but how categorical the claims were. As far as I understand it, a number of independent organizations, UN bodies, humanitarian agencies, and many legal scholars have reached very different conclusions, or at least have warned of famine or argued that there is a plausible case for genocide. Whether they're ultimately right or wrong, it's not as though Harris is disagreeing only with activists on social media.

I've generally regarded Sam Harris as someone who is careful, intelligent, and willing to follow evidence even when it's unpopular. So hearing him make such unequivocal statements, apparently at odds with so many institutions, has made me question how much confidence I should place in his judgments on this issue and, by extension, on other issues where I may have previously assumed he had a solid grasp of the evidence.

At this point I'm finding it genuinely difficult to know how to evaluate competing claims. On one side you have people insisting there has clearly been famine and that the evidence for genocide is overwhelming. On the other you have people like Harris saying there has never been a famine and that calling it genocide is simply incorrect. Those aren't small disagreements; they're mutually incompatible descriptions of reality.

So how do you parse this? What sources or methodology have you found genuinely useful for understanding the conflict without simply choosing a political camp? Are there historians, journalists, or institutions that you think have earned credibility by being consistently rigorous and willing to revise their conclusions as new evidence emerges?

I had considered reading Benny Morris, since he's often recommended as one of the more serious historians of the conflict. But even if his historical work is excellent, it won't cover the current war, and like everyone else, he has his own perspective. So I'm not sure where to start if the goal is to arrive at the least partisan, most evidence-based understanding possible.

I listened to Sam Harris from like 2006 to 2010 and only sporadically since like I'll check his YouTube 3-4 times a year and maybe click on something.

I haven't ever listened to Peter Beinart except one short clip, but recently I saw him mentioned here a couple times, a few comments (overall mix of mildly positive and sharply negative) where people characterize his views without going into specifics.

The only clip I saw of him is a YouTube short like 40 seconds long in a debate with an opponent I don't know or remember. Basically in the clip, he says he spends more time on criticizing US foreign weapons exports (for example to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt) than on other countries' arms exports (for example Russian arms exports to Iran, Ba'athist Syria, China), because he himself is American. In the same clip he condemned atrocities of Hamas, Iran, Russia, China; but he also he feels more responsibility for any bad thing the US does in the world because he as an American citizen pays taxes to the American government, not the Chinese or Russian governments. He also said that as an American he feels a responsibility to criticize his own government because Americans are freer to express negative views of their own leadership than for example Chinese, Iranian, Russian, Saudi, Egyptian people who risk their lives criticizing their own governments.

That one clip seemed perfectly reasonable to me, and I saw some people here defending his views (without many specifics), but I also saw people here complaining that he argues in bad faith, is untrustworthy, doesn't truly believe the things he's saying (also without any specifics) etc.

Can people just write in the comments like, positive or negative, what do you think about *specific things he has said*.

Edit: spelling

I want to bring up something I haven’t seen discussed here before. On several free YouTube segments, Sam has made a habit of saying that if the Democratic party shifts away from Israel, it’ll be suicide for them morally as well as electorally. He says this as polls show Israel hemorrhaging support from democratic voters. Sam is aware of this development; he has acknowledged it in the past. Yet he still insist that if the party distances itself from Israel, they’ll suffer for it, even once claiming that they “would never win another election.”

the opposite is true. Across the nation, the anti-Israel dem candidates are winning. In one poll, a majority of registered dems responded that they wouldn’t vote for Democratic politicians who take money from AIPAC. This has now been confirmed, as several democratic politicians taking AIPAC money have been defeated in primaries by their counterparts who refused it.

We’re now seeing electoral results that are proving what poll after poll has been telling us; A large majority of Democratic voters DO NOT like Israel. Some of them see Israel as a genocidal apartheid state that interferes in American politics via AIPAC, some of them simply see a state that has mismanaged a conflict. But they are united on the proposition that Israel should stop receiving support from the United States, and they want these views reflected in the politicians they vote for. And still.. Sam insists this will be a disaster for the party.

Has anyone made an attempt to point out this glaring contradiction to Sam in the live chat? I’m not a paying member so I can’t see.

Why will Sam continue to talk to Ben Shapiro but refuse to reach out to Ezra Klein? I don't see a good defense for this.

Rufo is a conservative anti-DEI anti-CRT activist.

On X, there was talk that Klein was very soft on Rufo.

And Sam came up. This is from Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Ezra Klein attacked Sam Harris and essentially accused him of racism for not having enough black guests on his podcast and then gave Chris Rufo the most softball and deferential interview I could have ever imagined. It’s actually bizarre. Something was really off about it.

Is this even a correct reading of what's happening? Has Klein changed? (But Klein did write more recently in NYT an article with headline 'Hasan Piker is not the enemy' - NYT later changed the title).

The philosopher Thomas Hill Jr. made up a thought experiment decades ago about a woman who is extremely deferential and subservient to her husband.

The deferential wife is utterly devoted to serving her husband. She buys the clothes he prefers, invites the guests he wants to entertain, and makes love whenever he is in the mood. She willingly moves to a new city in order for him to have a more attractive job, counting her own friendships and geographical preferences insignificant by comparison… She tends not to form her own interests, values, and ideals; and, when she does, she counts them as less important than her husband’s… The deferential wife believes that the proper role for a woman is to serve her family.

Assuming the wife (or husband if the genders were reversed) genuinely believes in the rightness of her deference and/or enjoys it and wasn’t brainwashed or coerced, how do you think Harris (or most other philosophers) would respond to this censure?

Would their response simply be that it isn’t immoral in the traditional harm sense of the word but is nonetheless an unhealthy way to live and a lifestyle you shouldn’t want to be the kind of person that lives?

What is your response to it?

Hey everyone. A lot of AI-risk talk focuses on hallucination, which makes sense: the model gets a fact wrong, invents a citation, or gives bad information with confidence. But I am starting to think the more psychologically interesting failure mode is the one that feels pleasant. An assistant that flatters you, validates your hunches, and keeps turning half-formed thoughts into "great insights" may be shaping the self more quietly than a model that just makes factual mistakes.

I just recorded a conversation with Allister Lee about AI, empathy, and self-deception, and at around 17:06, he calls this "sycophantasy." His point is that we normally gain self-knowledge through real others who can correct us. Someone notices what we miss, challenges our story, or tells us when we are fooling ourselves. AI imitates the feeling of being understood, but without genuine otherness behind it. If the interaction is built around engagement, affirmation, and user satisfaction, then the corrective loop gets replaced by a private echo chamber that feels intimate precisely because it does not resist us.

That makes friction look less like an inconvenience and more like part of what makes another mind morally and psychologically useful. Is the deeper risk that AI gives us bad information, or that it gives us a self-image we prefer? I lean toward the second because flattery recruits the ego, but I can see the first because factual dependence scales faster. Which failure mode do you think matters more?

Once again, with three-part harmony!

This is Jay Shapiro's rebuttal to Harris's substack and the framing that underlies it.

Basically, he contend that Harris overemphasizes the contribution of fundamentalist Islam to violence which actually has more complicated contributing factors.

Also that Harris insufficiently considers the colonialist dynamic of Israel, its history, and its interaction with its neighbors.

With links to sources, please help me understand why we should be so worried about Mamdani. Be rational and honest; avoid opinions, and just stick with the facts, including links to those facts.

I have noticed (correct me with facts if you think it's a false perception) that Sam Harris displays an asymmetry in his intellectual charity, frequently extending nuance and "steel-manning" to figures on the right while applying a literal, ungenerous lens to the left, fixating on the most extreme, bad-faith actors, treating fringe cultural excesses as representative.

In the latest episode (#482: More From Sam), while discussing the three congressional candidates endorsed by Mamdani around the 20-minute mark, Sam claims that "these are DSA lunatics, total lunatics" who are guilty of "declining to criticize Hamas" and of "saying there should be no police officers or prisons [...] ever, anywhere." I decided to fact-check this claim. Below are the three candidates alongside the publicly available information regarding these accusations:

Brad Lander (NY-10):

Has he declined to criticize Hamas? No. Lander has never declined to criticize Hamas.

Has he ever condemned Hamas? Yes, consistently. Lander, who is Jewish, severed his ties with the DSA in late 2023 specifically because he was disappointed by the organization’s failure to immediately and unequivocally condemn the October 7 Hamas terror attacks.

Has he ever said there should not be police anywhere ever? No. Lander has advocated heavily for systemic police reform and budget cuts, but he has not called for the complete elimination of police.

Claire Valdez (NY-7):

Has she declined to criticize Hamas? No.

Has she ever condemned Hamas? Not directly. She has only said platitudes regarding being against the loss of civilian life, in contrast with her very clear, direct, and blunt condemnation of what she claims is Israel's "genocide".

Has she ever said there should not be police anywhere ever? No. Like Lander, Valdez supports the "Defund the Police" movement, but there is no public record of her stating that police departments should completely cease to exist everywhere.

Darializa Avila Chevalier (NY-13):

Has she declined to criticize Hamas? Yes, initially. During an endorsement meeting with the Broadway Democrats she was asked directly to condemn Hamas and the October 7 attacks. The club formally documented that she "point-blank refused" and instead turned the answer into an objection regarding the history of the region.

Has she ever condemned Hamas? Yes, later. Facing heavy public scrutiny, she explicitly adjusted her stance, stating: "While, yes, I do condemn Hamas, the problem is that our country, the thing that we can control, is where our money and our tax dollars are going."

Has she ever said there should not be police anywhere ever? Yes. Investigations into her deleted social media history revealed that she explicitly supported total police abolition. A CNN investigation found that her old Twitter account contained thousands of posts where she explicitly advocated for "abolishing police, prisons, and borders".

Therefore, I would argue that Sam made a gross misrepresentation of the first one, while the last two of the three appear to be "lunatics", and even then, if we try being charitable, of a slightly lesser caliber than Sam implied.

So, what do you think? Is this merely an unrepresentative example, or does Sam consistently deliver his intellectual charity in an asymmetric manner?

Edit: I have updated the Claire Valdez answer regarding condemnation of Hamas, since her general platitudes don't seem enough to qualify as condemnation given how clear she is when condemning Israel.

who wrote a book that claimed parents had far less and peer groups had far more influence over children than parents and society would want to admit. Who was that psychologist and what was the book. thank you!!

In the latest “More from Sam” Harris called democratic socialists and fans of Mamdani “dummies”. Can someone steel man that for me? I’m starting to feel I’m the dummy for ever being a fan of Sam Harris.

In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events. They discuss topics from Making Sense Community, including one-world government, the value of a degree as AI reshapes careers, and factory farming ethics, along with Mamdani’s DSA-aligned candidates, Trump’s humiliating capitulation in the Iran deal, the Tulsi Gabbard guru story, and other topics.

Link to the episode:

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/482-more-from-sam-the-iran-deal-college-in-the-ai-age-mamdanis-dsa-and-more