Sam Harris
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2021
1:53:00 · 1.2M views · Jun 13, 2020
A Sam Harris podcast episode from June 2020 on the protests and unrest after George Floyd's death, discussing racism and police violence in America in light of the available data.
HN commenters recommend it as a data-oriented discussion of race and police shootings.
5 comments from Hacker News
>Our media is destroying the USA. I think this is incredibly true. And it is spreading to other parts of the world. There is a lot of sensationalism, around black lives matter protests, and very little objective analysis of the "problem". It seems incredibly irresponsible considering the results. I would urge everyone to listen to (or read) what Sam Harris says in his podcast on the topic, he brings some objectivity and rationality back to the discussion. You feel like there is still some sanity left in the world after listening to it. this video [LINK]
> The BLM protests were in response to a real, meaningful threat actually, your two examples are very alike in the "things that did not happen" category. the murder of George floyd was negligent at best and malicious at worst, but racist cops killing blacks is simply not a large issue, and certainly not a "meaningful threat" to all black people. San Harris published a seminal piece on the matter: this video
Sam Harris did an excellent podcast (in my opinion) touching on the topics you mentioned. this video or text [LINK]
Throwaway because current environment is hostile to nuance, and consequences are disconnected from intent. On these topics, I am always confused by the variety of positions. I note that NPR is considered high factuality, left of center bias, so I generally want to trust them. It's tricky to cut through the difficulty of understanding that we have a set of laws and those laws say a police officer is allowed to shoot someone, race irrespective, under circumstances. And it's a tragedy when someone loses their life, but the hypothesis of allowing police to kill someone is that the individual is suspected to be dangerous to others whom are less suspected (ie innocent). Then there are takes like this this video -- Sam Harris examines the available data and gives compelling argument that race is probably not a real variable in police killing civilians, especially when we start to examine same race police killings...
I suggest you give this a listen: this video It will be difficult to hear, but it's not as cut and dry as most people are making this out to be.