Sam Harris: The great problem of our time

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About the video: "I think we need a truly open-ended conversation with 8 billion strangers, and
what makes that hard to do increasingly is a level of political fragmentation and extremism and
partisanship born of our engagement with these new technologies."

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Our culture has atomized: We’re all on our own with our phones, laptops, and digital media experiences. No one knows what everyone else is seeing. In some ways, these technologies have caused a shattering of culture, and we can’t seem to agree about our perceptions of the world, says philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris.

To combat this, we need to secure some semblance of human wellbeing. What makes that an increasing challenge is the political fragmentation and extremism born from our engagement with new technologies.

We’re witnessing a zero-sum contest between those of us who want to maintain open societies and those who increasingly want to build closed, belligerent ones that make it impossible to share space. We have to become more intelligent to deal with these threats without losing the values we seek to defend. That’s why dogmatism is an intellectual sin, and overcoming it is key to building a better future for us all, says Harris.

Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/sam-harris-fragmentation/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description

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About Sam Harris:

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.

Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.