re: Sam Harris responds to Biden Address

I fail to see what Sam Harris has done in his career that renders him an authoritative voice on much of anything.

His arguments on morality are just rebranded utilitarianism that he thinks are somehow novel because he threw in some scientific terminology; and his arguments against free will that I’ve listened to are fairly laughable and sophomoric, such as his claim that existence of a spontaneous thought implies that all sensations of free will are illusory. I also personally think it’s rather pointless to even try and derive a moral code if your take on the world is that everything we do is predetermined, but that’s a conversation for a philosophy thread.

Even his arguments against religion for which he gained fame and are probably his most persuasive, primarily his excessive leaning into the problems of evil that believers in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent entity have to grapple with, have decent rebuttals that are accepted in the theological and philosophical communities as holding water (Plantinga’s free will defense being a solid place to start but by no means the only contention).

His domain of expertise is neuroscience, and I’m not sure how much he’s actually published in that domain and as far as I’m aware he hasn’t done much work there in a very long time.

He was a fun listen for a while and I used to like his podcast as an empiricist. However, he just hasn’t aged well at all. Not sure what about his takes on the world warrants any bandwidth from me these days.