Sam Harris

It's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant.

I think it is.

Even these asymmetries aside, I mean, it is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up, right?

But still, there are debates worth having, even given that limitation.

And they're the right people to have those specific debates.

And there's certain topics where I'll debate someone just because

I'm the right person for the job, and it doesn't matter how messy they're going to be.

It's just worth it because I can make my points land at least to the right part of the audience.

Well, yeah, and the nature of the subject matter.

But there are other people who just by default, I would say, well, there's no reason to give this guy a platform.

And there are also people who are so confabulatory that

They're making such a mess with every sentence that insofar as you're even trying to interact with what they're saying, you're by definition going to fail and you're going to seem to fail to a sufficiently large uninformed audience where it's going to be a net negative for the cause of truth, no matter how good you are.

So like, for instance, I think...

talking to Alex Jones on any topic for any reason is probably a bad idea because I just think he's, he's just neurologically wired to just utter a string of sentences.

He'll get 20 sentences out, each of which has to be, each of which is, you know, contains more lies than the last.

And,

There's not time enough in the world to run down, and certainly not time enough in the span of a conversation, to run down each of those leads to bedrock so as to falsify it.

I mean, they'll just make shit up.

Or make shit up and then weave it in with half-truths and micro-truths that give some semblance of credibility to somebody out there.

I mean, apparently millions of people out there.