Message from @DanielKO
Discord ID: 408419872767475712
If you have to lie to convince your son to be a decent human being, maybe your moral positioning is not sound.
I mean, the question sounded legitimate, why the fuck was Harris being sarcastic on his answer?
Maybe only people with very high IQ can derive morality through secularism? "Sorry, you're a pleb, you're better off lying to your child than try to do what I do."
"i wrote a whole book on it"
the soundest of logical arguments
he wrote a book on the subject of lies and how harmful they are, and you take a joke as him advocating for lying. I suggest you go back and listen to it again, and Ben probably should too if he thinks not telling your child everything is somehow lying to them.
he told ben he wrote a book on the subject instead of making an argument
and ben said i read it
don't remember him saying that in the QA, but if he did, I can understand since it was the last question before they ended the show
it was during the debate
i was just talking about when Ben was trying to get into the details of his ideas
he said I wrote a book on it
in that case, that is not very helpful to a debate
I remember the question.
And I remember he indeed answered it like that, "lie to him". Not the exact words, but pretty much.
What I'm saying is, even if he's just being sarcastic, making a joke, that's inappropriate.
I don't think the woman wanted a sarcastic answer.
no, he argued that she didn't need to tell him about free will in order to make him stop doing stupid things, and then at the end they were joking
But who is to judge on whether his actions and decisions are stupid?
the mother said so
JBP mentioned that on one of his lectures, "it's not clear that taking advantage of people isn't on your best interest. Why shouldn't you take advantage of people whenever you can get away with it?"
so clearly, in her mind, the kid's actions were stupid, she wants to stop him, but she thinks that because he has no free will, he'll be unable to learn how to stop doing these things
what does that have to do with not telling your child that they do not have free will?
She wasn't worried about the child struggling to cope with the non-existence of free will. She wanted to know how to make sure he grows to be a good person.
if I understood her correctly, she wanted him to learn why what he was doing was stupid, but she didn't understand how that would be possible if he had no free will. I feel as if it's more her lack of understanding on the subject of free will, or the lack thereof, that is what Harris was trying to tell her about. But I might be wrong.
Harris told her, jokingly, not to tell the child, because of what an 18 year old might do if they're told they do not have actual control over their own actions.
That is not advocating lying, no matter how you attempt to twist his words.
otherwise, every parent that hasn't transfered all of their collective knowledge to their children, would be classified as liars.
Here's the transcript:
- I have kids. So when it comes to free will, I get it, I'm completely on board, Sam, with your idea that there's no free will. When it comes to raising kids, where's the ...
- Don't tell them.
[laughter]
- I have an 18 year old boy who's gorgeous and when I'm trying to tell him to do the right thing and he does something stupid, and then I want to find out why he did that, I don't even ask, because that's a stupid question, because he doesn't even know why he did it. Because he's an 18 years old boy. But when I'm looking at impacting his future behavior, where's the practical separation between knowing that there's really no free will, and wanting your children to be responsible in their behavior and what they do in the world.
- [Sam proceeds to just bullshit a response that makes no sense, some rambling about discipline] But as far as what to tell kids, you need a strong sense of agency, that the measure of what to tell kids, or what to tell anybody ultimately, is what true and useful, right? You just don't download random truths, because some truths are not worth knowing at certain moments in life.
I'm not twisting words. She's clearly worried about morality. She wants her son to be a decent human being for society.
Also, he thinks an 18 years old is a child that can't handle the "there's no free will" truth.
Found this thing I got from google during a career fair.
Are you a white male?
If you are, you should ask about the prospects of career progression as a white male, inside Google. You heard they really hate white males.
And if you aren't, you should still ask things related to their affirmative action policies.
"I'm an oppressed minority group, is Google going to do the right thing and pay me proportionally to my oppression points?"
🤔