#56 — Abusing Dolores

#56 — Abusing Dolores

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about empathy, meditation studies, morality, AI, Westworld, Donald Trump, free will, rationality, conspiracy thinking, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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Transcript

SpeakerA
0m 7s
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0m 51s

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I have Paul Bloom on the line. Paul, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

SpeakerB
0m 51s
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0m 52s

Sam, thanks for having me back.

SpeakerA
0m 52s
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1m 12s

You are now officially my well, I have, I think, only two return guests, but you have just edged out David Deutsch, who has two appearances. So you're the only third appearance on this podcast. So that says something. It's not exactly like a 20th appearance on the Tonight show, but it is a measure of how good a guest you are.

SpeakerB
1m 12s
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1m 17s

I'm touched. Maybe a decade from now, who knows, we could be doing our 20th anniversary show.

SpeakerA
1m 17s
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1m 27s

Well, after we did our second show, people just emailed me saying, just have Paul on the podcast all the time. You don't need any other guests. So you are a popular guest.

SpeakerB
1m 27s
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1m 39s

Well, we had a great discussion, I think, a little bit about what makes for a good discussion, which is you and I agree on a lot. We have a lot of common ground, but there's enough tension and enough things to rub against that we could get some good discussion going.

SpeakerA
1m 39s
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2m 45s

We will see if we can steer ourselves in the direction of controversy, perhaps. But you have just released a book, which we talked about to a significant degree, I think, in your first appearance here, and we would be remiss not to talk about it some, so we'll start with that. But people should just know that if they find what we were about to say about empathy intriguing. Our first podcast has a full hour or more on it, and it is an incredibly interesting and consequential issue, which we will be giving short shrift here because we've already done it. But the proper intro to this topic is that you have just released a book entitled against empathy, which is a, I think I told you at the time, is a fantastic title. You seem to steer yourself out of a full collision with the outrage of your colleagues. In your subtitle, you have as a subtitle the case for rational compassion. So you're not against compassion, obviously. Tell us about your position on empathy and how it's different from compassion.

SpeakerB
2m 45s
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7m 25s

So the distinction is super important, because if you just hear him against empathy, it'd be fair enough to assume I'm some sort of monster, some sort of person arguing for pure selfishness or entire lack of warmth or caring for others. And that's not what I mean by empathy. And that's actually not what psychologists and philosophers mean by empathy either. What I'm against is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling their pain, feeling their suffering. And I'm not even against this. In general, I think empathy is a wonderful source of pleasure. It's essential to sex. It's central to sports. It's central to the pleasure we get from literature and movies and all sorts of fictional entertainments. But what I argue is, in the moral realm, when it comes to being good people, it steers us dangerously astray. It's a moral train wreck. And the reason why is that it zooms us in on individuals like a spotlight. And in fact, the fans of empathy describe it as a spotlight. But because of that, it's very biased. I'll be more empathic towards somebody who is my skin color, then of a different skin color towards somebody I know versus a stranger. It's difficult to be empathic at all to somebody who you view as disgusting or unattractive or dangerous or opposed to you. And in fact, there's a lot of neuroscience studies we could get into that get at this not only through self report, which is kind of unreliable, but actually looking at the correlates of empathy in the know, finding that some studies find that. One of my favorite studies tested male soccer fans in Europe, and they watch somebody who's been described as a fan of their same team receive electric shocks, and then it turns out they feel empathy. In fact, the same parts of their brain that would be active if they themselves were being shocked light up when they see this other person being shocked. So that's great. But then in another condition, they observe somebody who's described as not being supporting the same team, and there empathy shuts down. And in fact, what you get is kind of a blast of pleasure circuitry when they watch the other person being shocked. And so empathy is biased and narrow and parochial, and I think leads us astray in a million ways, much of which we discussed the last time we talked about this. Compassion is a bit different. So my argument is what we should replace empathy with for decision making is cold blooded reasoning of a more or less utilitarian sort, where you judge cost and benefits. You ask yourself, what can I do to make the world a better place? What could I do to increase happiness, to reduce suffering? And maybe you could view that in a utilitarian way. You could do it in terms of a kantian moral principles way. But however you do it, it's an act of reason. What's missing in that? And that's the rational part of my subtitle. What's missing in that is everybody from David Hume on down has pointed out, you need some sort of motivation, some sort of kick in the pants. And that's where I think compassion comes in. So many people blur empathy and compassion together, and I don't actually care how people use the terminology, but what's important is they're really different. So you can feel empathy. I see you suffer and I feel your pain, and I zoom in on that. But you could also feel compassion, which is you care for somebody, you love them, you want them to thrive, you want them to be happy, but you don't feel their pain. And some really cool experiments on this, for instance, were done by, and this is going to connect to one of your deep interests. Out of meditation were done by Tanya Singer, who's a german neuroscientist, and Matthew Ricard, who's a buddhist monk and so called happiest man alive. And they did these studies where they train people to feel empathy, to experience the suffering of others, and then they train another group to feel compassion. And the way they do it is through lovingkindness, meditation, where you care about others, but you don't feel their pain. Now, it turns out these activate entirely different parts of the brain. There's always some overlap, but there's distinct parts of the brain. But more to the point, they have different effects. So the empathy training makes people suffer, it makes people selfish, it leads to burnout. While the compassion training is pleasurable, people enjoy it. They enjoy the feeling of kindness towards other people, and it makes them nicer. And recent studies, like very recent studies by the psychologist David Destano in northwestern, back this up by finding that meditation training actually increases people's kindness and the explanation that they give, and it's an open question why it does so. The explanation they give is it ignites compassion but shuts down empathy circuitry. That is, you deal with suffering, and you could deal with it better because you don't feel it. So this is one way I'd make the distinction between empathy and compassion.

SpeakerA
7m 25s
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8m 32s

Yeah, I think we probably raised this last time, but it's difficult to exaggerate how fully our moral intuitions can misfire when guided by empathy, as opposed to some kind of rational understanding of what will positively affect the world. The research done by Paul Slovik on moral illusions is fascinating here. When you show someone a picture of a single little girl who's in need, they are maximumly motivated to help. But if you show them a picture of the same little girl and her brother, their altruistic motive to help is reduced reliably. And if you show them ten kids, it's reduced further. And then if you give them statistics about hundreds of thousands of kids in need of the same aid, it drops off a cliff. And that is clearly a bug, not a feature. And that, I think, relates to this issue of empathy, as opposed to what is a higher cognitive act of just assessing where the needs are greatest in the world. One could argue that we are not evolutionarily well designed to do that.

SpeakerB
8m 32s
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8m 52s

We aren't. I mean, I remember you cited the slovic findings. I think it was in the moral landscape where you say something to the fact that there's never been a psychological find that so blatantly shows a moral error. Whatever your moral philosophy is, you shouldn't think that one life is worth more than eight, let alone worth more than.

SpeakerA
8m 52s
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8m 55s

100, especially when the eight contain the one life you're concerned about.

SpeakerB
8m 55s
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10m 0s

Exactly. It's a moral disaster. And, I mean, the cool thing is that upon reflection, we could realize this. So I'm not one of these psychologists who go on about how stupid we are, because I think every demonstration of human stupidity or irrationality has contained with it a demonstration of our intelligence, because we know it's irrational. We could point it out and say, God, that's silly. My book cites a lot of research show, demonstrating the sort of phenomena you're talking about. But it's an old observation. Adam Smith, like 300 years ago, about 300 years ago, said, gave the example of an educated man of Europe hearing that the country of China was destroyed at a time when they would have never known somebody from China. And Smith says, basically, your average european man would say, well, that's a shame, and he'd go beyond his day. But if he was to learn that tomorrow, he would lose his little finger, he'd freak out. He wouldn't sleep at all at night. How am I lose my fingers? Will it be painful? How will it affect my life? And he uses an example to show that our feelings are skewed

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