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Sam Harris Didn’t Understand Ford/Kavanaugh Either
Sam Harris has been a high priest of leftist culture for a while now. But I think he’s solidified his position with his recent “analysis” of the Ford/Kavanaugh debacle. He essentially he broke it down like this:
1. Kavanaugh lied about stuff under oath. Harris’ evidence for this was that he knows what “boof” meant in the ’80s. Unfortunately “boof” has at least four meanings and one of them is the one Kavanaugh used. In other words, Harris’ claim is unconvincing.
2. Because Kavanaugh wasn’t being tried as a criminal, he shouldn’t have been presumed innocent until proven guilty. The presumption of innocence goes beyond due process and isn’t unique to the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. The civil standard of preponderance of evidence still relies upon innocent until proven guilty. It’s just that the level of proof required is not beyond a reasonable doubt. The presumption of innocence is a rational baseline for almost any question. It’s virtually identical to the Null Hypothesis utilized by skeptics. Basically, unless there is evidence positive belief of any kind isn’t required.
3. Bayesian probability analysis of who lied is enough evidence to say that Kavanaugh is probably guilty which meets the preponderance of evidence standard. Whether or not she or he lied isn’t the issue so Bayesian probability about who did or didn’t lie isn’t relevant. She doesn’t need to be lying to be mistaken, and likewise, neither does he. It’s entirely possible that he got blackout drunk and did this awful thing. If he has no recollection of the event due to alcohol affecting his memory, then he isn’t lying, but he would be mistaken concerning his innocence.
She also could have misidentified him. That can and does happen. That’s why the statistic about false rape allegations isn’t relevant either. Women don’t lie about being raped or assaulted very often. But the statistic is used as evidence that women like Dr. Ford are accurate in identifying their assailants. That statistic, however, isn’t about identifying assailants correctly. As is the case with most crimes, misidentification of the perpetrator is not uncommon. That’s why the only thing that is relevant is actual evidence. Without evidence, there can be nothing to ponder, pre or otherwise.
So the problem here is that Harris doesn’t understand what counts as evidence in this kind of situation. This isn’t a scientific question or even a philosophical one. It’s more like a historical question. When people deny the Holocaust, we don’t engage in Bayesian probability analysis of whether or not it happened. We go to historical sources, documentation, and the massive amount of survivors. If none of these things existed we wouldn’t have any reason to believe the Holocaust took place. But there is an inordinate amount of evidence that it did.
Even if Harris was right about the Bayesian probability, he isn’t taking into account all the relevant information. Dr. Ford’s testimony about the second door is never mentioned by anyone on the left. An investigation into the door showed that her testimony about it made no sense and in fact could’ve been a ruse unrelated to Kavanaugh.
Published in Law
You mean with feigned sincerity, or genuine sincerity?
If the latter, you must believe it.
But it’s not true. It’s not your truth, or the other person’s truth.
He might be a heretic priest. He likes Charles Murray. He’s not into the left’s culture of conformity.
I don’t believe Ford and here’s why: In 36 years of alleged suffering she never tried to contact Kavanaugh to ask that he apologize. As someone credentialed in psychotherapy, Ford, as much as anyone, knows that for someone struggling to overcome the trauma of a sexual assault, the act of confronting the assailant with the truth and getting his acknowledgement and apology is the best therapy. Nothing else comes close. She knows that. What did Dr. Ford do to get over this alleged assault? Nothing, for decades. Although she was active in Democratic Party politics for a lot of that time. Then as a conservative Republican is about to be elevated to the Supreme Court, and tip it in a decidedly more conservative direction, she sends a letter containing heretofore unknown sexual assault allegations against this Republican nominee, not to the Judiciary Committee Chairman, but to the ranking member of the opposing party, and simultaneously deletes her social media history reflecting her activism. Sorry, folks. These are not the therapeutic acts of a suffering soul, these are the political acts of an activist.
I don’t either…there are too many other inconsistencies and problems with her claims (from my own post a few days ago):
I listen to every Waking Up podcast.
In general, Sam is brilliant, but even brilliant people can be blinkered when it comes to ideology and partisanship. Therein is a lesson for all of us: be cautious how deeply you imbibe the narrative of “your team.”
With regards to this particular point and anywhere Trump is involved, Sam has a Fred level case of TDS.
No doubt Harris is a pretty smart cookie…however, he does let his Leftist bias get the best of him often and has an obsession with biblical literalism just as much as some religious fundamentalists do. Peterson actually has a deeper understanding of the biblical narrative and its symbolic and metaphoric value and how it’s linked to a neurological/psychological understanding of human morality, behavior and ultimately meaning which Harris just can’t quite seem to grasp. On a personal demeanor level, Peterson is much more the humble explorer, willing to acknowledge his own intellectual limitations, especially when he articulates that for some works of philosophy, theology, or literature it takes him a lot of time to grapple with the ideas and concepts until he feels he understands them. On the other hand, I’ve never once heard Harris admit to his own limitations in any corresponding way. He espouses with no such doubt or skepticism about his own limitations. It’s kind of an arrogance that shows when he says something occasionally idiotic…or can’t comprehend what it is that others, like Peterson, are saying…in my humble opinion, of course.
Not really the topic here, but have you watched the sitcom “The Good Place”? I’d be very interested in your take on it.
As much as I admire Prof. Peterson, he takes his own discipline far too seriously when discussing the Bible, which is in general a jangling collection of discordant narratives which accreted over the course of centuries.
When you have a box full of hammers, the world looks like a nail and he hammers away at the Bible in that fashion, laboring mightily to force it to take a shape inimical to it’s otherwise humble beginnings.
That doesn’t even touch the fact that Peterson himself doesn’t believe in God – at least no version that any Conservative American Christian or Evangelical would recognize.
When you hear him discuss what he thinks God actually is, my BS meter pegs, because he knows he has to say something which is simultaneously slippery, vague and academic sounding enough to please Christians, skeptics and any other casual consumers.
We’ll have to disagree on that point. I think he’s uncovering many aspects of the Biblical stories – especially in Genesis – that others haven’t attended to or have articulated. He is selective about the stories he examines thus far and is not treating the Bible as a consistent narrative and I think would agree with you that many books of the Bible are indeed discordant.
I don’t presume to know what Peterson believes or doesn’t believe. He is hesitant to quickly ascribe a particular characterization of God when asked because, as he has mentioned many times before, he has no idea what his questioner means by ‘God’. That said, his understanding of God may actually be closer to orthodox Catholic theology than many conservative American Christians or Evangelicals…so, in a sense you may be right.
I don’t have the impression that Peterson speaks to please anyone. That’s why I find him refreshing to listen to.
Yabbut, different people disagree on what qualifies as “evidence”. How the heck do you impose the strict rules of evidence used in the courts on the general population without violating the 1st Amendment?
Evidence and likelihood (probability) are related, though, @acgleason. Evaluating evidence is engaging in a probability estimate, if only a qualitative one.
Sam Harris may have done this well or poorly, but his problem wasn’t that he knows evidence and probability are related — they are. His problem would have been bad analysis despite his knowing this. See page 121 of this PDF for a classic way of relating evidence to probability, using the intuitive notion of how “loud” the evidence is:
For those interested, this guy put together a very basic toy model of the Ford-Kavanaugh thing. It is intended to be a basic, rough model, not the be-all and end-all of establishing the likely truth, but one thing I can’t help noticing is that you could estimate some of those conditional probabilities quite high and still come away with only a 5% that Kavanaugh was guilty of something like what Ford claimed — and 5% is plenty for reasonable doubt. If we wanted to condemn a fellow citizen we’d want to be more like at least 80% sure (many people who try to quantify it use at least 90%) he did wrong, and a mere 5% chance is way lower than that.
The inordinate amount of evidence the Holocaust happened translates into a very high likelihood the Holocaust happened. So likely, it’s not worth doubting, in fact — which is to say the historicity of the Holocaust is well beyond any reasonable doubt.
I’m not reading his mind, Brian, I’m reading what’s he’s said about it:
None of this piffle has anything to do with Jesus or the Bible, really. What it’s pointing at, rather slyly is the notion that Jordan always teases… that things can be “true” without being “accurate” in the historiographic sense. This is his way of saying that the Bible may be full of things which reflect the psychological underpinnings of humanity, and they may be “true” in that sense, but they aren’t things which actually happened.
The events described by Ford can’t be proven one way or another, and so that accusation has to be ignored. It should never have been a factor in the confirmation hearings.
Kavanaugh wasn’t charged with a crime, but he was accused of a criminal act, and his career was on the line. It would have been immoral and unreasonable not to adhere to the presumption of innocence.
Well, that’s not quite true and I wouldn’t be so quick to characterize it as piffle. God can quite arguably be considered to represent existence and action of consciousness across time…and I would add beyond time. That would be a very Thomist idea. You can challenge that notion on scientific grounds, I suppose…but it would be difficult to disprove it beyond all reasonable doubt because doing so would be most unscientific.
All these statements by Peterson (conveniently taken out of context by the way) do have a great deal to do with approaching an understanding of God…even as Peterson has also warned against defining God too precisely (which I’m pretty sure he also articulates in his marathon discussions with Harris to my recollection after having watched all of them). I think the writer of the article you cited is being a bit disingenuous because it seems as though he is accusing Peterson of providing what seem to be precise definitions while still being evasive. But I think, what Peterson is doing is attempting to approach an idea of what God could be rather than emphatically declaring what God is or is not in any precise fashion.
And the problem with this is what exactly? Are we not allowed to derive meaning from events described that may or may not have happened but may have been written to put forth an understanding of moral or immoral/decent or reprehensible behavior? I don’t think Peterson has ever taken a position that the stories in the Bible, especially the earlier portions of Genesis, are actual events with actual historical figures (Adam, Eve, Abraham, Cain, Abel…). Harris on the other hand, discounts what can be gleaned from the stories or relegates them in a sort of moral relativistic way to other literary works because it appears that he is affronted that some fundamentalists believe them to be literally the word of God never to be questioned for their historical accuracy. Therefore, Harris is almost espousing a ‘so-what’ attitude that they have little value or shouldn’t be taken so seriously because they are merely mythology. Peterson is not so dismissive, especially considering the impact of the lessons of Judeo/Christian ‘mythology’ have had on the development on western civilization and that when they have been dismissed, the result has been that people, to their great regret and self-annihilation, embraced ideologies of evil.
There’s no problem with it, and I generally agree with him in that sense. Fundamentalists however want to make every jot and tittle come correct and many non-fundamentalists contort themselves into unspeakably obscene shapes to explain why things like the Slaughter of the Amalekites was both an historically accurate event and somehow morally right.
It also matters deeply because… well, if this whole Jesus thing didn’t happen then that’s pretty awkward for a lot of people. So, I think it’s important to note that there must be an element of historicity to the Bible’s claims or it becomes little more than a collection of stories from the Bronze age which we must sift through to find the nuggets which are important.
It also begs the question: if it is merely a group of stories, some of which are discordant and others of which are undeniably foul or evil, is this really the best that we can do in terms of the summa of our species’ moral canon?
Your objections are duly noted, and I agree with you on much of it, but I don’t think that Peterson is merely relying on the historicity or lack thereof of the Bible to try understand what God might or might not be. There are obviously parts of the Bible that are horrific, absurd and should be dismissed, IMHO. I think Peterson is seeing some parallels in some neurological and psychological phenomena, since that’s the discipline he’s been immersed in lo, these many years, with what is related in some of the biblical stories and it has caused him to delve into the possible meanings of the stories more deeply and discovering that many of the stories are more profound and worth exploring than many of the Atheist intellectuals want to grant. I think Harris and Matt Dillahunty, who are rather strident, perhaps overly-confident, Atheists tend to be so fixated on the opposing stridency of fundamentalists that they are often talking past Peterson or missing what Peterson is saying.
The orthodoxy of strident Atheism:
That bug is the left’s feature. So, no. Worst of luck to Harris. He is accountable for knowing, and acknowledging, his side’s blood-drenched history, still unfolding. His side actively provides cover for a return to pre- and post-Civil War level political violence. No person of good will should indulge him by extending to him the presumption of innocence, which he denies to “Kavanaugh,” — really a proxy for all of us who dared raise our hands against our betters on 8 November 2016.
My brother was divorced a few months when his son was killed in an accident. His ex wouldn’t let him see his son’s room, help with thank yous, pick out a headstone, wanted the insurance settlement for herself, and as a final show of ignorance, bashed him at the funeral home when he died a decade later. A good example of how not to handle children and divorce.