Sam Harris

journal articles.

I'm sure someone's using ChatGPT for this as we speak.

And if it's not credible, if it's not persuasive now to most people, I mean, honestly, I don't think we're gonna... I'll be amazed if it's a year before we can actually create journal articles that would take a PhD to debunk

They're completely fake.

And there are people who are celebrating this kind of, you know, coming cataclysm.

But it's just, there are the people who don't have anything to lose who are celebrating it or just are so confused that they just don't even know what's at stake.

And then there are the people who have, the few people who,

who we could count on a few hands, who have managed to insulate themselves, or at least imagine they've insulated themselves from the downside here enough, that they're not implicated in the great unraveling we are witnessing or could witness.

I think it's important to acknowledge upfront that there's something paradoxical about how we relate to authority, especially within science.

And I don't think that paradox is going away, and it doesn't have to be confusing.

And it's not truly a paradox.

It's just like there are different moments in time.

So it is true to say that

within science or within rationality generally, I mean, whenever you're having a fact-based discussion about anything, it is true to say that the truth or falsity of a statement does not even slightly depend on the credentials of the person making the statement, right?

So it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel laureate, you can be wrong, right?

The last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit, right?

And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to be right about something or to be right for the wrong reasons, right?

Or someone just gets lucky.

And there are middling cases where you have like a backyard astronomer who's got no credentials, but he just loves astronomy and he's got a telescope and he spends a lot of time looking at the night sky.

And he discovers a comet that no one else has seen, you know, not even the professional expert astronomers.