This seems rather disappointing on Sam Harris’s part, given that he indeed had training in philosophy (he has a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford, according to Wikipedia). If this post describes Harris’s position correctly (I haven’t read the source material), it seems to boil down to Harris saying that science can tell you what your instrumental goals/values should be, given your terminal goals/values, but it shouldn’t be hard to see (or steelman) that when someone says “science can’t bridge Hume’s is–ought gap” they’re saying that science can’t tell you what your terminal goals/values should be. It seems like either Harris couldn’t figure out the relatively simple nature of the disagreement/misunderstanding, or that he could figure it out but deliberately chooses not to clarify/acknowledge it in order to keep marketing that he knows how “science can bridge Hume’s is–ought gap”.
I’m not sure this post has actually captured Harris’ frame (I’d weakly bet against it, actually, both because I think capturing people’s frames is hard, and because ‘it’s all marketing or weird politics’ is pretty high on my list of possible causes).
But it’s not that surprising to me that people could spend years not able to understand that they are coming at a situation from very different frames that “should” be blatantly obvious.
This seems rather disappointing on Sam Harris’s part, given that he indeed had training in philosophy (he has a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford, according to Wikipedia). If this post describes Harris’s position correctly (I haven’t read the source material), it seems to boil down to Harris saying that science can tell you what your instrumental goals/values should be, given your terminal goals/values, but it shouldn’t be hard to see (or steelman) that when someone says “science can’t bridge Hume’s is–ought gap” they’re saying that science can’t tell you what your terminal goals/values should be. It seems like either Harris couldn’t figure out the relatively simple nature of the disagreement/misunderstanding, or that he could figure it out but deliberately chooses not to clarify/acknowledge it in order to keep marketing that he knows how “science can bridge Hume’s is–ought gap”.
I’m not sure this post has actually captured Harris’ frame (I’d weakly bet against it, actually, both because I think capturing people’s frames is hard, and because ‘it’s all marketing or weird politics’ is pretty high on my list of possible causes).
But it’s not that surprising to me that people could spend years not able to understand that they are coming at a situation from very different frames that “should” be blatantly obvious.