Current Affairs31 Jul 2022

A Neuroscientist Critiques the Dangerous "Populist" Pseudoscience of Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian whose books have been major bestsellers, praised by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. Harari not only offers a sweeping chronicle of the human past, but makes confident predictions about the human future. His visions of a future in which technology creates godlike humans has turned him into a kind of prophet, especially in Silicon Valley, though Harari insists he is a mere objective chronicler.

Darshana Narayanan is a neuroscientist and journalist whose Current Affairs article "The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari," available in our March-April 2022 issue, shows that Harari's claim to broad-ranging expertise is dubious and the stories he tell often lack sufficient factual foundation. Narayanan argues that belief in these unsupported prophecies is dangerous and experts need to do a better job of spreading the true findings of their academic fields so that populist pseudoscientists don't become our go-to explainers of reality.

Today, Darshana joins to discuss her article and Harari's work. We talk about:

Why deterministic visions of the human future are both wrong and harmful, because they inhibit our sense of the possible
How many of Harari's statements become meaningless upon scrutiny, such has the idea that lions are more "self-confident" than humans
The comparison between Harari and Jordan Peterson, both of whom fill a void where a true culture of public intellectualism should be (the Jordan Peterson article can be read here)
How experts are strangely resistant to critiquing and engaging with "popular" books, meaning those books don't get rigorously fact-checked or refuted

The Sapiens diagram explaining the "economic history of the world" that Nathan makes fun of during this episode looks like this:

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