Top all-time · #144
Sam Harris
Personal blog · samharris.orgphilosophysciencepolitics
Sam Harris's personal blog at samharris.org covers philosophy, science and politics. Since 2010, 280 different Hacker News readers have linked it 412 times, most often “The Fireplace Delusion”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sam Harris's site mainly for its podcast episodes and blog posts on politics, religion, science and meditation, which commenters cite as support for their own points.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Commenters call the podcast a treasure and recommend specific episodes, including the meditation lessons, as useful and worth listening to.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores some of the most pressing and controversial questions of our time.
Most-linked posts?
- The Fireplace Delusion11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2018-04-03
- The Fireplace Delusion (2012)8 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-12-12
- Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-07-11
- The Worst Epidemic [audio]7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-08-04
- Can We Pull Back from the Brink?6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-06-19
- The Fireplace Delusion6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-02-03
- What Is Technology Doing to Us? Attention Economy Downfalls6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-04-15
- /podcast4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-06-20
- Sam Harris and Glenn Greenwald "Islamaphobia"4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-06-07
- /podcasts/142-addiction-depression-meaningful-life/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-11-15
What Hacker News says?
It's not surprising. The left-liberal camp was always turning a blind eye towards many important national issues and importantly about the issue of Islam. This reminds me a talk given by Sam Harris about the blunder being done by left-liberals regarding their dishonest/spineless treatment of Islam. His video titled "Sam Harris : Liberals failure to talk honestly about Islam is responsible for the rise of Trump" is v…
Comment linking /islam
on “Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.”Submitted The Fireplace Delusion as a story · 322 points
HN discussionI don't like singling out bad stories about one person on a larger website that is part of a larger philosophy. And more generally, you seem to think very badly of those people that try to improve the world in their way. That's more than can be said about the vast majority of other communities. This is probably a hammer and nail thing, but having just heard a podcast about disinformation campaigns ( https://samharri…
Comment linking /podcasts/145-information-war/
on “The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News”Submitted Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011) as a story · 304 points
HN discussionThis will help: https://samharris.org/how-to-meditate/
Comment linking /how-to-meditate/
on “Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?”Submitted The Fireplace Delusion (2012) as a story · 73 points
HN discussionI find Sam Harris' Waking Up guided meditation lessons the most useful (can find it on mobile app stores, the 30+ lessons are free and start off short and simple). Until those, I thought meditation was inherently coupled with eastern mystic bullshit with zero benefits for anyone who didn't want to buy into a bunch of other baggage. He has a book by the same name as the mobile app. The first chapter (read out loud he…
Comment linking /podcasts/chapter-one/
on “Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?”Submitted The Fireplace Delusion as a story · 34 points
HN discussionPointing to the last Sam Harris podcast [1]. He interviewed an infectious disease specialist, who like several other infectious disease specialists I heard before, isn't particularly concerned by this event. It is serious, but not alarming. I should note that Sam Harris is rather on the worried side of the spectrum (and felt compelled to add a disclaimer at the begining). [1] https://samharris.org/podcasts/191-early…
Comment linking /podcasts/191-early-thoughts-pandemic/
on “Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says”Submitted The Fireplace Delusion as a story · 31 points
HN discussionSam Harris & Yuval Noah Harari answer a question about "peak" meditative experiences, and set them in context with psychedelic experiences in the segment starting at 1:27:20: https://samharris.org/podcasts/138-edge-humanity/
Comment linking /podcasts/138-edge-humanity/
on “Psilocybin for major depression granted Breakthrough Therapy by FDA”Submitted Can We Pull Back from the Brink? as a story · 14 points
HN discussionBut anyone going to Macy's can see the ad. Please do read some Tufekci. She does a much better job describing this than I do (unsurprising, given she's studied it extensively), and I hesitate from regurgitating her here wholesale. She did a podcast with Sam Harris that I found illuminating, if you prefer that format. https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/persuasion-and-contro...
Comment linking /podcast/item/persuasion-and-control
on “Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads”Submitted The Pleasures of Drowning as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI am sure there are many others, but these three shows feature long-form interviews which feature interesting guests: The Ezra Klein Show - Ezra Klein Making sense podcast - Sam Harris 80000 hours podcast - Rob Wiblin [1] https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast [2] https://samharris.org/podcast/ [3] https://80000hours.org/podcast/
Comment linking /podcast/
on “Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video]”Submitted On the Freedom to Offend an Imaginary God as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThe difference between a paid person and an unpaid person may not be so large. I heard from someone who looked into the anti-vax accounts on Facebook (in ~2013, when the comments on HN about this news would have been about preserving free speech on Twitter rather than good on them for doing this) that she found some people believed it so strongly that they wrote bots to respond to public messages that use certain ke…
Comment linking /podcasts/145-information-war/
on “Information operations directed at Hong Kong”Submitted Bruce Schneier explains security to neurologist who profiles Muslims as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThat apparently makes very little difference. I listened to an interview with a Yale professor who cited stories that showed minimal impact. The supposed reason is that by the time you know a country has an outbreak, it's already to late and people from there will have travelled to your country. What apparently had been shown to be very effective is preemptive school closures. Unfortunately that's a tough call becau…
Comment linking /podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus
on “Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community”Submitted Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI remember one quick reply of Kahneman when Sam and Daniel were discussing about intuitions and how people are wrong many times. Sam Harris jokes, "I have met these people". Daniel replies, "We have met them and we see them in mirror" [0] [0] 17:25 @ https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/150...
Comment linking /podcasts/making-sense-episodes/150-map-misunderstanding
on “Daniel Kahneman has died”Submitted The Riddle of the Gun as a story · 8 points
HN discussion>Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost.< Like most of what Zizek says, this doesn't survive even the slightest scrutiny. Not that I want to be seen as "pro-torture", but to dismiss it categorically, as Zizek does, is to fail to grapple with the more general ethical conundrum of collateral damage. Harris…
Comment linking /blog/item/why-id-rather-not-speak-about-torture1
on “US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program”Submitted EZRA KLEIN: EDITOR-IN-CHIEF as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI get it and I have no disagreement with qualifying the numbers. It's a very complicated issue, but, if it is in fact true, when controlled for all other factors, if a particularity defined demographic group engages in disproportionate amount of criminal activity (less or more), then wouldn't you expect that that would filter down to the individual interactions? If an individual police officer is choosing who to fri…
Comment linking /to-profile-or-not-to-profile/
on “Why the US military usually punishes misconduct but police often close ranks”Submitted The Truth about Violence (2011) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI am not an expect, but it seems like DNA is responsible for around 50% of the personality variance between individuals. Note that the variance within groups is an order of magnitude bigger than the variance across groups, so there aren't super strong ties to race. I would imagine personality and/or propensity to mental illness or addiction are decent predictors of likelihood to commit crime. See this podcast for an…
Comment linking /podcasts/211-the-nature-of-human-nature/
on “Breach exposed more than one million DNA profiles on a major genealogy database”Submitted Drugs and the Meaning of Life as a story · 6 points
HN discussionRelated: https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/
Comment linking /the-fireplace-delusion/
on “The health benefits of better air”Submitted Sam Harris #253 – Corporate Courage a Conversation with Jason Fried as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
