Why Sam Harris is almost correct on election integrity
It's the creation vs. evolution debate all over again
Mason is saying that looking into things is going to get us closer to truth, so what’s the harm in looking?
Sam Harris says the people questioning the election results aren’t motivated by truth and their analyses shouldn’t be shared carelessly.
This all started (AFAICT) when Bret Weinstein quote tweeted evidence that mail-in votes coming from further away tend to come from rural, right leaning areas, so we should see the count favoring Trump over time.
The narrative I’ve been seeing before the election is that Trump has been telling people to vote in person and the left has been telling people that mail-in voting was the way to go. I assumed we’d see mail-in votes favoring Biden.
In any case, why would Sam Harris be so ambivalent about looking into the matter? According to CBS, lots of people question the integrity of the election:
52 percent of Republicans believe President Trump "rightfully won" the presidency yet it was "stolen"…68 percent of Republicans said they were concerned the election was "rigged."
One poll shows 80% of Trump voters question election’s integrity. We get some data showing that election fraud might be happening. Why not engage with the criticisms? Why go straight to the “bad faith” argument? Sam Harris is one of the sharpest public intellectuals. I’ve been a big fan of him for a long time. I think he has a point, but before I critique him, I want to explain where I think he’s coming from.
Where is Sam Harris coming from?
To understand why he feels this way, I think it’s important to understand his previous experience in a similar situation where the public and the experts were in disagreement with the public. This was much earlier in his career.
40% of Americans believe in creationism. Sam Harris, however, sided with the experts. In this video he makes the point that creationists are arrogant for jumping in and criticizing evolution. Creationists simply don’t know what they’re doing.
Sam Harris isn’t someone casually give us his hot take. He’s seriously engaged with, and continues to engage with people who have different opinions from his own. He’s an open minded person. He’s not afraid to take a contrarian opinion. He’s debated Christians.
Richard Dawkins, who’s also debated creationists says it may even be harmful to debate them because it would give them a platform. To those on the right, this platforming argument may sound familiar. It’s especially prescient in modern politics, but I’m not going to engage with it in this post.
What I want to draw attention to is how Dawkins is saying the conversations may actually be harmful. You don’t say this if you tend to win debates against your opponents. Dawkins, Harris, and the new atheists have spent a lot of time debating creationists. They want to debate them, and have spent a lot of time doing so. Why would someone spend so much time debating their opponents only to call them flat earthers? Why did the new atheists ever think it was a good idea?
To a science-minded person who loves debate, it’s tempting to see creationism as an opportunity. Lots of people believe something obviously wrong, so you believe that it should be possible to win them over with logic and evidence. Or at the very least, make it obvious to anyone on the fence that the other side is dumb.
The scientific method, all the science and data that’s been collected is so vast and convincing that it should be easy to win a debate. Plus, you feel like you have truth on your side. You’re debating against people who believe in a book that was written thousands of years ago and hasn’t been updated since. It should be as easy to disprove the creation story of the Bible as it is to disprove the existence of Zeus.
So, the science-minded person decides to debate a creationist and this is what happens:
The debate is eerily familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to modern politics:
Wendy, from the video claims censorship of evidence against evolution
She says teach the controversy (aka marketplace of ideas)
She brings up evidence against evolution, but gets stonewalled with Richard Dawkins not even addressing her point, and talking past it
She calls evolution a “religion”, just as the left is now seen as a woke religion by the right
Talking past each other
Dawkins using ad hominem attacks
Does Dawkins look like he’s winning the debate?
The new atheists, including Sam Harris, have contended with this paradox for at least a decade. You have all the knowledge and evidence, but you feel like Cassandra. You utter truths, but you’re cursed to never be believed.
When Sam Harris sees evidence of voter fraud, he’s picking up on the same pattern that has played out inconclusively in the creation debates. It’s not Sam’s first rodeo and I believe he’s trying to tell (otherwise smart people) that their naive open mindedness isn’t going to get them anywhere. It’s the same game he’s seen many times before.
Is Sam Harris right?
Bret Weinstein quote tweeted a debunking of his original tweet.
Is Mason right for believing that there’s no harm in kicking the tires of the election process to verify that it works as intended? Arguably, yes. Personally, I looked at the original analysis and read the debunking and learned to be more humble. It’s exciting to feel like you’ve discovered something new and important. But now I see how a discovery might not always be what it’s cracked up to be.
Is Sam Harris right in being skeptical that the people doing the tire kicking are going to do it badly? In this case, yes. In the analysis case we’ve looked at, it’s not clear it was put together in bad fait. In general, I see why Sam Harris is skeptical. He knows that the main people seriously questioning the election results are the rabid Trump supporters with a clear agenda.
Is there bad faith on the part of the retweeters of the original analysis? How many people who’ve retweeted @APhilosophae’s analysis retracted it after it was debunked? At the time of the writing of this post, the original analysis got 10k combined tweets and retweets. The debunking got about 700 tweets and retweets. Misinformation travels faster than the correction.
Lots of people will see @APhilosophae’s analysis and never see the correction. These people will just know that there is something fishy going on with elections. Of the people who retweeted the original and saw the correction, a certain portion of these might not look into into it and try to understand it. These people are arguably operating in bad faith. Of the people who do lookin into it and understand it, some won’t retweet the debunking. These people are definitely operating in bad faith. They’re more worried about their own reputation than the truth.
What can we learn from this?
Clearly, the people who lost the election are the most motivated to find out if an election was carried out properly. There’s nothing wrong with this. But the real question is will people believe and spread the truth when they see it?
In the case we’ve looked at, the answer is no. So what do we do about it? This is where the left takes on the usual tactics we’re used to seeing with censorship and reliance on expert opinions. The goal is to stop misinformation in its tracks. They want to only provide a platform to the experts.
Suppose @APhilosophae was right and he really did discover evidence of fraud? Then we’d be in the situation that the right worries about. They’re afraid that the left censors the truth.
There have been recent situations where the experts were wrong. When COVID-19 was first discovered, the tech industry got a lot of flack for being the first to stop doing handshakes, start wearing masks, and stop travel to China. But more importantly, sometimes the underdog is right. History is mired with weird beliefs that were once popular, but have since been disproven.
I don’t think we should expect people to believe the truth. Unfortunately, in the search for truth you may inadvertently provide your opponents with ammunition that they may use against you. The only way you can reliably convince people of the truth is if you can show that the truth will help further their own personal interests.
If you censor misinformation, you may accidentally amplify it. If you refute it, you may give it a platform in doing so. If you ignore it, people might believe it because they see the case for it, but not against. The skeptics community sometimes like to ignore something until it’s big enough that talking about it doesn’t amplify it. It’s hard to know what to do. Wrong people vote and help drive policy. It feels morally right convince them that they’re wrong.
As someone who loves debate, I know debate doesn’t help you make friends. I make this mistake again and again. My guess is the best you can do is search for truth, and if someone disagrees with you, don’t debate them. They may end up hating you. It’s better if they’re indifferent.