The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru Jordan Peterson is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers.

I consulted colleagues in the neuroscience and evolutionary biology community and found that Harari’s errors are numerous and substantial, and cannot be dismissed as nit-picking. Though sold as nonfiction, some of his narratives hue closer to fiction than fact

Harari’s claims are scientifically invalid, but they cannot be dismissed. “We live in a digital panopticon,” as my colleague, neuroscientist Ahmed El Hady, says. Corporations and governments are constantly monitoring us. If we let people like Harari convince us that surveillance technologies can “know us far better than we know ourselves,” we are in danger of letting the algorithms gaslight us. And that has real-world implications for the worse, such as deciding who is employable or who poses a security risk based on the supposed wisdom of an algorithm.