Sam Harris is the last remaining sane person in the IDW, and he’s not even in it anymore. He renounced it a few months ago based on its sheer lunacy.

But now with all this antivaxx stuff I think the situation has gotten much worse.

Being super smart and education is clearly not enough. The Weinstein brothers are super smart, nice people, with lots to say and lots to offer. But I repeatedly see Eric boosting stuff that makes me cringe. And his brother Bret is just outright broadcasting it, not just boosting it.

And I still like Rogan, but over the last few months he’s been moving into the “just asking questions” mode as well. On UFOs especially. He’s basically just having fun talking to people who have wacky ideas that could—conceivably—have some sort of merit. Maybe.

That’s a low bar, and I’m already busy.

So meanwhile Sam, who is one of the OGs of this entire space, is increasingly alone. He’s found a way to stay firmly in the center while everyone else seems to have fallen off the edges.

His friend Majid? He’s gone crazy about vaccines and all sorts of things. Eric and Bret? They’ve let their skepticism metastasize into a loss of common sense on risk management. It’s a numbers game. Simple numbers. But they can’t do the arithmetic because they’re too busy trying to do linear algebra.

Ben Shapiro? Super sharp still, but he can somehow look at everything Biden is doing and say that Trump was better for the country. Seriously? Like I’m with him 90% when he’s bashing the extreme left, and how much damage their doing to their own causes.

But instead of stopping there, and bashing the right just as hard, he somehow concludes that Trump was right on the big things, and he just had personality problem that was slightly unseemly.

Peterson. Well, he’s still solid on his main points. And I love him on the search for meaning, especially in young men. But once again, he can’t stay on solid secular land when doing so. I get that religion is being more important to him. I get it. Especially given what he went through. I respect it. I respect him respecting religion. Hell, I respect religion now too.

But once again, you have to stay clear-headed enough to see the downside at the same time.

That’s what’s happening to us right now. We’re taking so much pressure on our shoulders, while standing on the tip of a triangle, that we’re being forced to fall down one of the two sides.

Jordan falls towards religion. Majid falls into another form of extremism. Joe goes looking for aliens. Eric and Bret become vaccine-truthers.

What the fuck is happening.

Like Sam can’t even have his old crew on the show anymore because they’re crazy.

It’s unbelievable.

What this has reinforced for me is that it’s not the IQ, or common sense, or education. Tons of Ph.D.’s, engineers, nurses, and even doctors are all about some antivax.

Unsupervised Learning — Security, Tech, and AI in 10 minutes…

Get a weekly breakdown of what's happening in security and tech—and why it matters.

It’s clearly not about traditional credentials or attributes. It’s something different that steels one against such idiocy. I’m not sure what it is, but we better figure that out before we unravel ourselves.

It’s pretty damn hard for an algorithm to figure out information from misinformation when the people with legitimate credentials are spewing nonsense just like the mouthbreathers.

Like we’re staring reality directly in the face, as a country, with all of our hospitals filling up again with the unvaccinated. People getting sick. People dying. Healthcare workers pleading with people to get vaccinated.

And you can have doctors, nurses, Ph.D’s, look at that data and ask about the vaccines. After we’ve administered tens of millions of them with very few negative effects.

This is the level of stupidity that can unmake a society.

If you’re that fucking disconnected from reality then people can literally say anything to you, like 2+2=4, or 1+1=5, and you can deny the first and accept the second.

This has to break. The bubble has to burst. We can’t survive like this.

And in the meantime, Sam, keep fighting. I’m here with you.