Pointing out that at some points Joe Rogan might have been smeared unjustly by mainstream media does not in any way come close to absolving the crimes JR has committed against modern science by giving constant airtime to outright quacks. Anyone remotely interested in making sure proper science knowledge and education makes it out to gen pop should be completely against Rogan and everything he stands for. It only takes one to ruin your reputation. Rogan has aired hundreds. It’s even more dangerous than one might think because sometimes, like in some examples you reference, there is some legitimate medicine mixed in.
Science doesn't work like that, religion does. "Science" harmed itself with some people and an ideology heavily censoring opponents, and by shutting down any debate, including scientific one.
The very idea that one can commit "crimes" against science by discussing ideas (however false) is shameful. As you said, it's no different than religious accusations of heresy. It's truly disheartening to see a backwards and illiberal idea like that being promoted here.
Science is not conducted through public debate. Full stop. There's a reason why it's peer review, and not talk show host review.
During COVID, most everybody was operating from an incomplete data set. Public officials were wrong about some things. You can choose to see this as a conspiracy set up by big pharma, or you can see it as imperfect people doing what they could to mitigate a public health crisis.
And yes, critique the peer review process all you want. It's flawed in many ways. But this "it's us versus science" narrative is extremely, insidiously damaging to society at large. It only serves powerful people who benefit from whipping an audience into a frenzy to buy their shitty supplements or bumper stickers or whatever.
The scientific principle is based on proving thing by experimentation.
it is empirical that means that you should be able to re-produce the results of a thing or assertion by following the details in a paper.
The public might be able to do it themselves. But the point is, its not about who says what, its about can it be reproduced.
scientist "A" says that the sky is blue because of "x". devises an experiment to prove that. writes up the experiment, publishes it, asserts that the sky is blue because of x, and that the experiment proves this.
Scientist "B" says it bollocks, reproduces the experiment, but also extends the experiment to show that the data also says that the sky is green. Paper is published with data and method.
The process repeats until a consensus is reached where everyone can reproduce the data, and no one can disprove the hypothesis that the sky is blue because of x.
None of that requires asserting bollocks on a chat show. Sure science outreach is great, but its not _really_ part of the method.
During the pandemic, though, we had scientists asserting that various physical methods would stop the spread of the virus with no evidence to back that up (masking, keeping 6 ft away from people, previous COVID did not provide immunity, vaccines would stop the spread of COVID, etc etc).
When scientists don't follow their own method, how should the public decide on which findings to trust?
>The scientific principle is based on proving thing by experimentation.
As documented in Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" there are periods where little progress is made because scientists get tunnel vision. It takes someone to come along and push things in a different direction, perhaps to the detriment of people with decades or lots of money sunk into a different orthodoxy, and navigating that turmoil can be challenging.
Who do you think decides which research gets funded, or published? If you go too far outside of what's acceptable to the establishment, your career is over. When there are billions of dollars on the line and your opposition can literally fund a dozen studies to "discredit" your take, it doesn't matter if your results can be reproduced or not. It could be many years before the truth comes out, if it ever does.
>None of that requires asserting bollocks on a chat show. Sure science outreach is great, but its not _really_ part of the method.
If you want to get funding for research then sometimes it is necessary to engage the public. If you hope to buck the well-monied establishment with hot takes, you might even need legal support. Besides that it's just interesting to hear what people are working on. I think people like to know what scientists think, and it gets boring to hear just a single opinion about things nonstop.
Actually, peer review journals are public debate. The much-applauded "consensus" is essentially voting. If you follow the money you will quickly see the connection between science and politics, both internally and with the public at large.
I am biased against anyone who wants to stop me or others from thinking lol. Yes, "peer review" means something. It means that the criteria to get published is that some approved reviewers must accept the results. No more, no less. Anyone can obtain a journal article and form their own opinion about the article and its authors. This includes members of other academic fields, or the general public. Sometimes this outside scrutiny is sorely needed to address problems in the research.
If one has good results and data, their academic pedigree theoretically shouldn't matter when it comes to publication. But we know it doesn't work like that generally. The real world does not live up to our lofty ideals.
This is the most anti-science attitude I think I've seen in a very long time. It's also foolish and dangerous IMHO, because it greatly contributes to the very thing you want to prevent: amplification and creation of quack science to the gen pop.
Simply depriving these people of airtime does NOT quash their views and make them go away. It fuels conspiracy theories such as about how big pharma is censoring ideas about natural (or already highly-available) treatments in order to make billions on devoloping their vaccines and using government levers to force people to buy them. (They did try to do that too, though they got lucky in that none of the "natural" treatments seemed to really work. But had they worked, their reaction would have been the same.)
It also means the discussions people see are going to happen on shows/forums/podcasts where the host doesn't push back on them and offer challenges and critical thinking. This not only sets a terrible example for people by demonstrating through social proof that one should accept these things uncritically, but it makes it appear as though the case is very strong and there isn't a good counter-argument! This double effect makes a strong impression on people in the exact opposite way that we want.
I think Joe Rogan has done more to bring sanity to these things than most people. Have you ever watched those episodes? He is very conversational but if there is ever a claim that doesn't seem supported, he will ask Jamie (his assistant or producer or whatever) look it up, and they are highly skeptical and choosy of sources.
We should know by now that censoring information these days does not work. We're no longer living in the society where the average person only gets information from TV or books available at their library or local book store. If there's a quack theory out there, it will get to people through the internet. The answer is not to shut down the internet. We need to expose these ideas and defeat them using logical and scientific refutation, and we need to encourage and teach critical thinking skills. This is a new world we are living in, and the tried and true techniques or censoring and book burning do not work anymore. Embrace it and use it.
> Simply depriving these people of airtime does NOT quash their views and make them go away.
> We should know by now that censoring information these days does not work
This argument (repeated) is a bit of a red herring. I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever. We're just questioning the wisdom of embracing and amplifying it to reach people it wouldn't have before.
> It fuels conspiracy theories
This is kind of a corollary to the above point: People are going to theorize conspiracies no matter what. There are undoubtedly conspiracy theorists who think the exact opposite: that including pseudoscience is a conspiracy to make people think it isn't being censored in other ways.
Thus, that a given action might strengthen or weaken the conspiracy theories of at least 1 pseudoscientist isn't enough to justify doing the action or not. Neither choice will make conspiracy theories go away.
>I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever.
You must not have been looking. There are government and media officials coming out against "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" on a constant basis. These same people are the biggest liars around.
>We're just questioning the wisdom of embracing and amplifying it to reach people it wouldn't have before.
"You can have free speech as long as you only speak quietly in your own closet." The power to curate information or "amplify" it as you say is practically very hard to distinguish from censorship when you choose to show only things you agree with, or show only the worst straw men for the other side.
>There are undoubtedly conspiracy theorists who think the exact opposite: that including pseudoscience is a conspiracy to make people think it isn't being censored in other ways.
There are some "conspiracy theories" designed to discredit anyone who is skeptical of authority. The people who complain the most about conspiracy theories really just want people to stop thinking independently, and start accepting whatever their establishment says.
>Thus, that a given action might strengthen or weaken the conspiracy theories of at least 1 pseudoscientist isn't enough to justify doing the action or not. Neither choice will make conspiracy theories go away.
Conspiring to suppress conspiracy theories sure won't make them stop. Being right and showing positive results to the contrary is what wins the day.
> "You can have free speech as long as you only speak quietly in your own closet." The power to curate information or "amplify" it as you say is practically very hard to distinguish from censorship when you choose to show only things you agree with, or show only the worst straw men for the other side.
No platform owes you the right to amplify nonsense. The government can’t make you stop, but individual platforms or individuals themselves? They’re free to do whatever, just like you. Don’t like it? Start a Truth Social and go yell at your adoring fans all you want.
> Conspiring to suppress conspiracy theories sure won't make them stop. Being right and showing positive results to the contrary is what wins the day.
While that’s a cute thought, conspiracy theorists are exceptionally good at one thing: theorizing conspiracies. “Being right” doesn’t happen, ever, because any positive results can simply be walked back as “part of another conspiracy.”
The way you kill conspiracy theories is not amplifying them as truth. That’s it.
>No platform owes you the right to amplify nonsense. The government can’t make you stop, but individual platforms or individuals themselves? They’re free to do whatever, just like you. Don’t like it? Start a Truth Social and go yell at your adoring fans all you want.
Governments of the world, including the US government, have repeatedly been shown to order these "private" platforms around. So this argument is cooked.
>While that’s a cute thought, conspiracy theorists are exceptionally good at one thing: theorizing conspiracies. “Being right” doesn’t happen, ever, because any positive results can simply be walked back as “part of another conspiracy.”
You should ask yourself why conspiracy theories make more sense to people than "the truth". Hint: It's because real conspiracies are commonfare.
>The way you kill conspiracy theories is not amplifying them as truth. That’s it.
Again this "not amplifying" is code for "censoring" or "burying". The truth inevitably shines through, even when it comes to this bullshit. You think the reality of censorship is a conspiracy, yet people have been censored heavily in this country for years now at the behest of the US government and some NGOs. Sometimes for strictly political reasons. You can call me a crackpot if you want but I've seen the censorship itself and the evidence of government involvement.
Who, pray tell, is qualified to judge what is worthy of "not amplifying"? That word makes me cringe every time because it was chosen to sound innocuous and appealing to young people. It is pure doublespeak.
Liberals even 10-15 years ago knew better than to argue for censorship. Now the left can't stop singing the praises of censorship, keep trying to redefine words to suit the agenda, and basically dragged the political dialogue into dangerous territory that was conclusively settled hundreds of years ago by brilliant philosophers.
> You should ask yourself why conspiracy theories make more sense to people than the truth
While conspiracy theorists believe this to be the case, and they are people, they're a slightly-vocal minority, and thus it'd be disingenuous to represent what conspiracy theorists think as what "people" think, unless you clarify that you're using the term "people" to refer to 1+ persons, not any indicative majority.
As you and I both said upthread: there will always be greater than zero pseudoscience conspiracy theorists who view literally anything as confirmation of the conspiracy theory.
>> I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever.
> You must not have been looking. There are government and media officials coming out against "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" on a constant basis.*
This is not evidence that they, or any significant amount of people, have said they can make conspiracy theories and pseudoscience go away forever. There's nothing wrong with "coming out against" disinformation.
>While conspiracy theorists believe this to be the case, and they are people, they're a slightly-vocal minority, and thus it'd be disingenuous to represent what conspiracy theorists think as what "people" think, unless you clarify that you're using the term "people" to refer to 1+ persons, not any indicative majority.
Conspiracy theorists are everywhere. Just casually mention price fixing and you'll see endless speculation from just about everyone about how "they're out to get you". Mention politicians and lobbyists and they will readily speculate about who is on the take, based on stupid shit like physical traits of a person. These same people will then cry about a bunch of other conspiracy theories that don't jive with their preconceived notions.
>As you and I both said upthread: there will always be greater than zero pseudoscience conspiracy theorists who view literally anything as confirmation of the conspiracy theory.
This is true. Likewise, many "normies" regard the existence of nutty conspiracy theorists as evidence that any speculation about possible conspiracies is evidence of stupidity or even insanity.
>This is not evidence that they, or any significant amount of people, have said they can make conspiracy theories and pseudoscience go away forever. There's nothing wrong with "coming out against" disinformation.
First of all I didn't say that. Second of all, there is a lot wrong with trying to police speech, especially under the pretense of it being "disinformation". If you care about disinformation then you put out good information only, engage in debates, and so on. Basically stop treating your fellow citizens like children for merely disagreeing. Even if we want to suppress untrue information, it is extremely difficult to be 100% sure what is true, and the intellectual and popular discourse requires free expression of controversial ideas. If you don't want to have your worldview challenged, there are many ways to tune out the stuff you don't care for. The problem we have is that the authoritarians are threatened by the fact that someone out in the world disagrees with them. They can't handle that because their egos are too fragile. (Of course, some authoritarians do not care about the ideas at all. They just want power and the ideas are the tool they use to get it. We have this type in the West too.)
This is just a variant of “both sides” argument. Both sides are not equal. There will be conspiracy theorists and quacks always, no matter what you do. It’s when you give them a microphone and any semblance of legitimacy that it becomes dangerous. Case in point: Alex Jones. The correct thing is to dismiss these people outright. It’s already been demonstrated that if you try to have a public discourse on this kind of stuff that bad actors will just come in and sow misinformation. Attempting to have such discourse merely elevates the legitimacy of the quack’s claims, since you can have the most detailed of detailed takedowns but be countered with literal word salad nonsense and still “lose” in the eyes of gen pop. The quack has everything to gain, because by getting into a discussion with someone legitimately qualified in a public arena they are placed on somewhat equal levels with that person in the eyes of the public. A standing in society they absolutely do not deserve.
By the way, Rogan himself has a few entries on Quackwatch for promoting questionable supplements that he has a financial interest in. So he’s not, as you imply and he would love to have you believe “just asking questions”. He is actively engaged in the same bullshit his quack guests come on and peddle.
