If there’s one person who is living proof that being an atheist has nothing to do with being a skeptic, it’s Bill Maher. Touting himself as being supremely rational in comparison to those “God botherers” and Republicans, Maher has himself embraced antivaccine pseudoscience, other cancer quackery, and general pseudoskepticism about “Western medicine.” Nor is this the first time he’s embraced HIV quackery, either. Indeed, I’ve been pointing out for more than a decade now just how much pseudoscience Maher embraces. Unfortunately, in some circles, that doesn’t seem to matter. For example, in 2009 Atheist Alliance International awarded Maher the Richard Dawkins Award, which was likened to Jenny McCarthy receiving a public health award.

My son likes to watch his show. I feel compelled to watch it with him in order to provide some balance to an impressionable mind.

My son likes to watch his show. I feel compelled to watch it with him in order to provide some balance to an impressionable mind.

Maher is a smarmy bastard. I really wouldn't equate him with Sam Harris. Their only connection is that Maher has Harris on his show, they're both atheists, and neither one is afraid to call out atrocious behavior and/or beliefs of Muslims.

Maher's show is entertaining

Of all the people worshipped by the boring Objectivity! online set, Maher and Harris unquestionably have the most lopsided ego to actual intelligence ratios. At least Dawkins is or was capable of engaging in actual academic debates without embarrassing himself a la Harris and at least Hitchens could be more entertaining to read than Maher's show ever has been even when he was completely full of shit.

Wait, so you don't think Harris is smarmy?

Maher has really done well because he cherry picks. if you are a debater, you don't necessarily get that option. Harris is involved in all that new agy bullshit which has made many of my buddies who championed him kind of back away as of recent. Dawkins problem was when he delved from the science side of the debate to the philosophy side where he seems way out of his element. selfish gene is a great book. god delusion was awful. He started getting a bit beat up and since backed away from the debate circuit.

hitchens was great. i loved reading his stuff. shame.

No, not really.

I think it comes through glaringly any time he attempts to have a debate or "exchange" with an expert on a particular topic as if they're on equal footing and proceeds to get sliced up like cheese. Maher's swarm comes at least in part from arguing with celebrities for most of his career even dumber than he is. Harris by contrast seems to think he's a damn renaissance man and proves how inaccurate that is every time.

Perfectly put. I posted this link last time Sam Harris came up, but to me, this is Example A of what you're talking about.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archive ... ot_to.html

Bruce Scheier destroys him in this debate, and Harris seems completely oblivious to that.

I don't really think Scheier did destroy him in that debate. It seemed lost on Scheier that Harris was speaking from a philosophical perspective while Scheier himself preferred to approach the topic as a policy wonk.

That's an indictment of Harris, not Schneier, considering the topic of the debate was the most practical way to prevent terrorist attacks at airports and/or on air planes.

I'm not indicting either one, but I don't think Harris was looking for the discussion to hinge on the skills of TSA agents which seemed to be Schneier's major objection to profiling.

Incidentally, when my sister was a TSA screener, one of the ideas they used in training was that Al Qaeda could pay $1 million or whatever to a 100 year old man who wanted to set up his family so that the old man would blow up the plane. That was how they justified the current policy of treating everyone equally. Obviously, I agree with Harris that finding such a person would be difficult of not impossible.

Harris is reviving a tradition going back to Plato regarding philosophy/public discourse. It's only a recent development that such discussion has become academicized. Reza Aslan likes to beat the other guy over the head with his "credentials". I never hear Harris do such a thing. He takes the statement/opinion at face value.

I'm not going to repost the whole thing here, but I don't see how you can come away from reading that thinking anything other than Harris got his ass handed to him by an expert in a field he himself was just pretending to be an expert in. Schneier routinely granted him liberties with the argument that weren't close to true or provable, and still pretty concretely showed why racial profiling would lead to worse security. Harris knew exactly what they were debating. He was just extremely out of his element on this one, and tried to re-direct the conversation multiple times. To his credit, Schneier brought him back every time.

I'm sure that's what he thinks he's doing, but he usually fails in the eyes of anyone except his fanboys. Credentialism sucks but Harris usually seems utterly disinterested in learning anything about the specific debates in the fields in which he decides to lend his two cents. And when pushed on his ignorance about specifics, he reverts to being a philosopher, except he's largely ignorant of philosophy as well and his thought experiments are more Intro class level than Plato.

I guess where we disagree is that I don't think Harris was pretending to be an expert.

Why though? Unless I'm missing something, there's nothing in Sam Harris's professional career that remotely qualifies him as a security expert. I mean, I guess maybe he studied it a lot in his free time, but I'd guess he doesn't know much more than you and I do on the subject.

I'm not suggesting he is an expert. My point is he wasn't approaching the subject as an expert. He was simply making suggestions about making the screening process more effective. Despite Schneier's dismissal of political correctness on his own part, i don't actually believe he was being 100% honest there.

He didn't seem to care much for the politics of the issue. He just knows racial profiling is bad security, and was trying his best to explain that in a non-condescending way, IMO.

Maybe. I'm not going to argue about airport security with a guy who is supposed to be an expert in that field. I'm sure he knows more than I do.

But I will say that I wouldn't call what Harris was suggesting "racial profiling". It's profiling, but not based on race. I've seen Harris have the conversation before and he always uses himself as an example of a guy who would receive special scrutiny based upon several factors- age, gender, look, etc. As it is, we waste time and resources doing shit like nearly strip searching my friend's mentally-handicapped daughter in her wheelchair and scaring the fuck out of her. (That's a real life example.)

For Schneier, it seemed to be about what we can't do. We can't possibly hire and train TSA agents to be able to make these judgments. That may be true in his practical experience, but maybe the TSA needs to stop hiring dopes. El Al uses a similar system to what Harris was suggesting (among other methods) and nobody ever takes over their planes.

Finally, and in fairness to Schneier, maybe I'm wrong here, but I do think there's a possibility that he had an impression of Harris as "the anti-Muslim guy" in the same way that Affleck did and that colored the conversation from start to finish.

I've done my cost-benefit analysis of profiling based on looking Muslim, and it's seriously lopsided. On the benefit side, we have increased efficiency as screeners ignore some primary-screening anomalies for people who don't meet the profile. On the cost side, we have decreased security resulting from our imperfect profile of Muslims, decreased security resulting from our ignoring of non-Muslim terrorist threats, decreased security resulting in errors in implementing the system, increased cost due to replacing procedures with judgment, decreased efficiency (or possibly increased cost) because of the principal-agent problem, and decreased efficiency as screeners make their profiling judgments. Additionally, your system is vulnerable to mistakes in your estimation of the proper profile. If you've made any mistakes, or if the profile changes with time and you don't realize it, your system becomes even worse.

The paper supports some of your intuitions about how useful your correlation is, but doesn't speak at all to the efficacy of building a security system around that correlation. That's what I have been trying to make explicit: just because a correlation exists doesn't mean that it is smart security to use it as a mechanism for dividing people into two categories and subjecting those categories to different levels of security.

I agree that the result is perverse. I agree that, on the face of it, it makes no sense to screen someone who looks and acts like Betty White, or those four wheelchair-using World War II veterans at San Jose Airport. But it results in better security. By "obviously wasting their time," security screeners are in fact both saving time and improving security.