"The Science of Good and Evil": An article arguing briefly for the book's main thesis.
I don't know if the book is any less bad, but this article is pure Dark Arts, and not even a competent attempt at those. I hardly see a single valid argument made in it. It is a mere collection of emotional appeals, invalid analogies, and ridiculous attempts to sell as "scientific" naive utilitarian ideas that anyone unbiased and moderately competent in critical thinking should be able to rip to shreds without any serious effort.
Like any other ideologue, Harris has a vision of what the social order should be like and how people should live their lives, and he wishes to push it onto those he disagrees with. This is nothing unusual by itself, but the real trouble is that in a way similar to an orthodox Marxist, Harris insists that his ideology has the force of "science" and therefore there can be no tolerance for those pathological elements who refuse to submit to his vision.
Traditional religious people, except for the greatest extremists, at least accept the fact that there will be other people around them who don't share their religion, so that it's desirable to find a way to agree to disagree. People like Harris, however, with their faith that their ideology is a product of "science" and thus infallible and necessarily accepted by anyone honest and sane, have no such concerns. Ultimately, if you have different ideas on how you would like to live your life and what kind of society you would like to live in, they are far more dangerous than all but the most extreme religious zealots.
Like any other ideologue, Harris has a vision of what the social order should be like and how people should live their lives, and he wishes to push it onto those he disagrees with.
You could argue against "pushing" the CEV "ideology" on people on the same grounds, couldn't you?
Sam Harris has a new book, The Moral Landscape, in which he makes a very simple argument, at least when you express it in the terms we tend to use on LW: he says that a reasonable definition of moral behavior can (theoretically) be derived from our utility functions. Essentially, he's promoting the idea of coherent extrapolated volition, but without all the talk of strong AI.
He also argues that, while there are all sorts of tricky corner cases where we disagree about what we want, those are less common than they seem. Human utility functions are actually pretty similar; the disagreements seem bigger because we think about them more. When France passes laws against wearing a burqa in public, it's news. When people form an orderly line at the grocery store, nobody notices how neatly our goals and behavior have aligned. No newspaper will publish headlines about how many people are enjoying the pleasant weather. We take it for granted that human utility functions mostly agree with each other.
What surprises me, though, is how much flak Sam Harris has drawn for just saying this. There are people who say that there can not, in principle, be any right answer to moral questions. There are heavily religious people who say that there's only one right answer to moral questions, and it's all laid out in their holy book of choice. What I haven't heard, yet, are any well-reasoned objections that address what Harris is actually saying.
So, what do you think? I'll post some links so you can see what the author himself says about it:
"The Science of Good and Evil": An article arguing briefly for the book's main thesis.
Frequently asked questions: Definitely helps clarify some things.
TED talk about his book: I think he devotes most of this talk to telling us what he's not claiming.