When I read this conversation a couple of months ago, I found it frustrating. I'd recently endured the 3.5 hour trainwreck of a conversation Sam attempted to h

When I read this conversation a couple of months ago, I found it frustrating. I'd recently endured the 3.5 hour trainwreck of a conversation Sam attempted to have Omar Aziz. Concluded that nobody could reasonably take Omar's side in it, and was sadly not surprised to see the crowds of people on Twitter concluding that Omar had "won" the conversation. I sought out the Chomsky conversation because I even though i'd heard it was disappointed from Sam's perspective, I was expecting it to be more nuanced. Neither came off particularly well, but I was especially frustrated by Chomsky. The source of my frustration was that I was constantly felt he would have been able to make a point that would give Sam pause for thought, to take the conversation down an interested road. But he wasn't willing to even briefly humour Sam's need to explore contrived thought experiments. If they'd just been able to get that out of the way, they could have gotten somewhere. I actually like Sam's thought experiments because they're a device to establish a dispassionate common ground on which to build the more nuanced (and challenging) conversations, but they seem to fall flat with the people who I'm most interested in him going head-to-head with.