Sam Harris
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Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And I'm alert to the difference because I've, you know, because in neuroscience, I've spent hours and hours in journal clubs, you know, diagnosing, you know, analyzing the difference between good and bad studies, right?
I'm alert to the difference between good and bad studies in medical journals, right?
And I understand that bad studies can get published and et cetera, and experiments can be poorly designed.
I'm alert to all of those things, but when I get sick or when someone close to me gets sick, I don't pretend to be a doctor, right?
I've got no clinical experience.
I don't go down the rabbit hole on Google for days at a stretch trying to become a doctor, much less a specialist in the domain of problem that has been visited upon me or my family, right?
So if someone close to me gets cancer,
I don't pretend to be an oncologist.
I don't go out and start, I don't start reading, you know, in journals of oncology and try to really get up to speed as an oncologist because it's not, it's... One is a bad and potentially, and very likely misleading use of my time, right?
And it's...
If I had a lot of runway, if I decided, okay, it's really important for me to know everything I can.
At this point, I know someone's going to get cancer.
I may not go back to school and become an oncologist, but what I want to do is I want to know everything I can know about cancer, right?
So I'm going to take the next four years and spend most of my time on cancer.
Okay, I could do that, right?
I still think that's a waste of my time.
I still think at the end of, even at the end of those four years, I'm not gonna be the best person to form intuitions about what to do in the face of the next cancer that I have to confront.
I'm still gonna want a better oncologist than I've become to tell me what he or she would do if they were in my shoes or in the shoes of my family member.
I'm gonna, you know, what I'm not advocating, I'm not advocating a,
a blind trust and authority.