Sam Harris

So I'm not making a virtue of ignorance.

and a blind obedience to authority.

And again, I recognize that authorities can discredit themselves or they can be wrong.

They can be wrong even when there's no discredit.

There's a lot we don't understand about the nature of the world.

But still this vast gulf between truly informed opinion and bullshit exists.

It always exists.

And conspiracy thinking is rather often, most of the time, a species of bullshit, but it's not always wrong.

There are real conspiracies, and there really are just awful...

corruptions born of bad incentives within our scientific processes, within institutions.

And again, we've mentioned a lot of these things in passing, but what woke political ideology did to scientific communication during the pandemic was awful.

And it was really corrosive of public trust, especially on the right.

for understandable reasons.

It was crazy some of the things that were being said and still is.

And these cases are all different.

You take depression.

We just don't know enough about depression for anyone to be that confident about anything, right?

And there are many different modalities

in which to interact with it as a problem, right?

So there's, yes, pharmaceuticals have whatever promise they have, but there's certainly reason to be concerned that they don't work well for everybody.