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: