Some Notes on Jordan Peterson’s Talks with Sam Harris

Why can't these intellectuals state their actual position for once?

There’s a series of talks available on YouTube between famed psychologist Jordan Peterson and famed philosopher Sam Harris. These talks took place in the summer of 2018 in Vancouver, Dublin and London. 

Links: Talk 1, Talk 2, Talk 3, Talk 4.

I have watched these with interest, and will just post some brief notes about these here. I think there’s a lot to be said here about the nature of debate in general and what it’s for. 

Observations on the Discussion as a Whole

The discussions are broadly well-moderated - the first two by Brett Weinstein, and the last two by Douglas Murray. 

The first 3 debates begin with Peterson and Harris steelmanning one another’s positions. This came as a pleasant surprise to me. I wasn’t particularly aware that people were aware of steelmanning outside of the rationalist community. (Realising that the rationality community isn't quite as insular as I thought it was is an increasingly common theme of my life). It filled me with joy to see this. My mind was filled with happy visions of Peterson and Harris double-cruxing, goal factoring, Hamming questioning, and comfort zone expanding. Sunlit uplands of agreement-reaching awaited. 

Unfortunately, these were mere flights of fancy. Peterson and Harris do not quite manage to bring the spirit of steelmanning to the rest of the discussion particularly well, in my view. 

What should be the purpose of discussions such as these? My two cents - the purpose should be finding where the speakers disagree and trying to move towards an agreement - or at least, trying to find what the cruxes between them are. 

A crux, in rationality speak, is a statement X for which it is true for speakers A and B that: 

> If X were true, A would change their mind.

> If X were false, B would change their mind. 

The idea being that X can ideally be empirically tested, but it could also theoretically be some fundamental untestable question. Even in that case, though, it's useful to find the crux. If you don't find the crux, you're destined to go round and round in circles to some degree. 

Many would say that this is not the purpose of the talks. The purpose is to ‘discuss interesting things’, or something along those lines. Some combination of education, insight and entertainment. And that does have a place, and it is certainly of value. I found the talks fascinating, and I think they leave the audience with plenty of food for thought, and that their mental models will be all the richer because of it. I’m tremendously glad that conversations like this can happen. 

BUT - this mode of discussion leaves me (and I think likely almost everyone, though they may not be aware of it) - frustrated a lot of the time. 

At numerous points in these discussions, Peterson and Harris seem to be getting somewhere on a certain point, and then one or the other of them - or the moderator - interrupts with some tangential point. The OBVIOUS MOVE at this point is to swat away the tangential point and continue down the previous train of thought. Yet both speakers rarely do this, instead allowing themselves to be carried away down the rabbithole presented to them, like moths to a debate-destroying lightbulb. 

Inevitably they then forget the potentially fruitful path they were going down for a moment, and once they resume it (if they resume it), they have lost momentum. 

Here’s an example:

At this moment, they are happily discussing metaphors and stories, which is at the core of their disagreement on the correct way to live. But then, Weinstein leads Peterson down the rabbithole of the interaction between dogma and the need for belief updating. At which point the discussion veers away from the more fundamental question they were previously discussing.

This is a big problem, because if two interlocutors can identify one another’s cruxes on one point, or through one method of enquiry, this can greatly increase the probability of them being able to do so again, on some other point. It creates a foundation of understanding that leads to a better view of the whole tapestry of their beliefs and where those beliefs differ from one another. Discussions like the ones Peterson and Harris inevitably end up having in these debates due to their propensity towards distraction (and, dare I say, grandstanding) provide us with but fleeting glimpses of parts of the two belief tapestries, and the whole thing then becomes an exercise in trying to connect dots between what one person said a minute ago, or ten minutes ago, or half an hour ago, and what the other is saying right now. If I wanted to watch professional connect-the-dots, I’d do that instead of watching this. 

All this is perhaps a symptom of their intermingling of the topics at hand. The two speakers need to discuss their substantive disagreements on religion separately from their disagreements on religious tradition. By failing to do so, they find themselves in a disorganised space, with their discussions jumping between the two topics, and they make suboptimal progress on both as a result. It’s clear that these two men simply can’t fruitfully discuss both topics at the same time. It may seem that the two themes - religion and ethics - are linked such that they must be discussed simultaneously, but I simply don’t think this is true. Peterson is not taking a strictly religious stance on ethics, and certainly not one that adheres strictly to scripture. 

In an important sense, from a rationalist’s viewpoint, these are not good discussions. They are a tennis match. “What about this,” cries Peterson. “Well,” retorts Harris. “I disagree with that for such and such a reason. But what about this?”

“Well, Sam, I disagree with that for such and such a reason. But what about this?”

And so on, and so forth. 

This is all well and good if it’s driving towards agreement, which generally it isn't. Such discussions are, in my view, a symptom of a more fundamental disagreement left unaddressed. The two would do well - and ultimately save time, in my view - by finding and making explicit those disagreements first. 

Now, as I’ve made clear, I don’t think these talks were a complete waste of time - far from it. They do reach some sort agreements or half-agreements on smaller points. But the overall trend of the debate over the four parts is very messy indeed.

I blame this lack of coherence on something both of them share: an inability, or unwillingness, or state their fundamental ethical claim of how people should live.

Both take the other to task on this at various points, and yet neither is willing to answer the question straight, in a way that props up the rest of their claims on religion and ethics.

I honestly think that if the two of them did answer this question, they could move much closer to agreement in the space of 20 minutes than they do in the four hours of debate they actually engage in. 

Now for some specific remarks on each of them, with examples to illustrate my point on this.

On Harris:

For someone who largely agrees with him, I find Sam Harris quite irritating to listen to at times. He needs to choose his points more carefully and stop hesitating mid-sentence. His propensity towards hesitation not only lessens the force of his argument, but at several points, entices Peterson to butt in. For someone so successful, I find him quite unsure of his own arguments at times; at others, he reaches for some argument that does not quite prop up his stance robustly enough. He gets to the end of the point a decent amount of the time, but often reaches not quite the point I would like him to make, nor the point that I believe would best serve the discussion. 

And all this is underpinned, as I said earlier, but his failure to define his fundamental ethical stance. 

For example, here: 

 

Peterson asks Harris what the basis is for his universal ethic, what he thinks could replace religion and leave humanity better off for it. 

Great! I thought. A fundamental question. O wise Dr. Harris, what wisdom have you for us?

Harris says:

“That’s an interesting problem for philosophers and for scientists. [But] that’s not actually where the rubber meets the road for people living their lives well. My job as a moral philosopher is to make the best case I can for these ideas.” 

What ideas, Sam? What ideas? 

What’s more, it is where the rubber meets the road. Isn’t that the claim Sam is making? That people need to find different values, separate from religion?

His lack of clarity on this point is infuriating, and his response to the above question from Peterson is the closest he gets to making a clear statement of his ethical principles. 

Peterson is understandably frustrated by Harris’ refusal to provide clarity on this point. But I have little sympathy for him, because he does exactly the same thing himself…

On Peterson: 

There’s a reason why Matt Dillahunty says that his discussion with Peterson on God left him ‘more than a little irritated’. 

Having watched Peterson in these discussions, I can come to only one conclusion about the way he approaches religion. Peterson has no position on religion as typically defined. He is often asked what his position is, and somehow or other contrives to avoid the question. And I’m far from the only one to have noticed this.

Now, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. He’s an agnostic, as far as I can tell. He has decided that the best thing he can do is to aim for truth, whilst never stating fully what he believes. He feels like his transcendental ‘story’ of civilisation is the correct interpretation of Christian teachings (and the Holy Trinity in particular), and is essentially unwilling to relinquish this idea for anyone. The concept feels so innate to him, that he’s decided that no evidence - or at a minimum, no evidence provided by someone else - will convince him that it’s not true. I’m not sure even he believes that it is true, in the sense of being totally convinced of it, but he certainly feels like it’s true, and that’s enough for him. 

And it may indeed be enough. 

He’s found a framework that he likes, and is determined that nothing will convince him that it’s not true, even if he doesn’t believe it in the sense that devout religionists believe in God(s). And that’s part of his framework - any evidence can be interpreted in a way favourable to his interpretation of things. And at that point, anyone discussing religion with Peterson will make little ground in convincing him of anything much that he does not already believe and is not already part of his worldview. And they certainly will not convince him of anything that challenges his framework.

Part of me is willing to respect this, and part of me is not. As Peterson says, none of us truly know what we believe and want (or very few of us do. I think some rationalists can get astoundingly close to being able to do this. Go CFAR). We are a thousand shards of desire. Every human being is ‘ruled by committee’, so to speak. We are large; we contain multiples. To stake any claim too strongly is to deny this. 

And particularly when it comes to fundamental values, I think it is vitally important to recognise that some things we just feel. We do not need to have our values written on our foreheads in order to be acting them out. And God knows what’s really going on in Peterson’s head - what he’s really optimising for. The circuitous way in which he speaks certainly suggests to me that he’s optimising for something quite invisible to the rest of us. Indeed, I have struggled deeply and tortuously with this problem myself. As Stewart Lee so eloquently puts it, we cannot say the unsayable.

But there are shades of grey. Peterson is Pretending to Be Wise. He has not internalised the opportunity cost of refusing to lay out what he believes and leaving it open to criticism. Is it really a good life to suspend judgement in this way? Does he have quite the impact he could have if he laid out his view in detail and for all to see, for it to be subjected to criticism, for him to tweak it if necessary or, if it is found desperately wanting, discard it altogether? I doubt it. 

Conclusion

Harris and Peterson should say what they mean.