Sunday, June 18, 2023

"Debate me": Rogan wants to host Hotez vs. RFK Jr.

Because of course he does

When someone is a expert in public health facts and values public health outcomes, they don't want to participate in a disinfotainment war. It degrades the dignity of their actual knowledge, and it may contribute to bad outcomes. Who "wins/loses" the debate is subjective and is not the point. Even if the audience at home judges that the scientist sounded better (which is unlikely), the entire event is a loss for science.

broken glass window

The audience wants to know who won this "debate," for the same reason they want to know who won an Oscar or an Olympic medal. It's part of knowing how to make and join conversations in society. In the process of trying to "keep up" with the current megalogues, however, they begin to assume that listening to the show would be a path to wisdom. The show's producers don't care if anyone absorbs that idea, as long as they listen to the show. It's the wrong idea.

BTW, RFK is transphobic.

"In a recently unearthed video interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the noted anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and a Democratic challenger of President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection bid, claimed chemicals in the water supply are turning boys trans.

“A lot of the problems we see in kids, particularly boys, it’s probably underappreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing,” the scion of the Kennedy political dynasty said during an interview with Canadian psychologist and ring-wing pundit Jordan Peterson."

— "RFK Jr. claims chemicals in the water are turning boys transgender," Christopher Kane, Washington Blade, June 19, 2023

Also BTW — this is a July 17 update — as shown by "Kennedy's first FEC filing, the lion's share of Kennedy's biggest donors have previously only donated to Republicans." (Judd Legum, Popular Information)

On Angry White Men: Tracking White Supremacy (June 18, 2023), there's a list of all the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists who have appeared on RFK Jr.'s podcast. He's made 143 episodes since 2021.

An MD PhD on Twitter criticizes Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation. Rogan responds that he'll donate $100,000 to a charity of the MD PhD's choice if he'll come on the show to publicly debate RFK Jr, who is a conspiracy theorist. In response to that, Dr. Danna Young tweets: The incentive structure is broken. Folks. Science cannot 'win' a media performance because science is not entertainment. Science is a practice, a method of pursuing truth. And in our current political media environment it is at a disadvantage against performative 'whataboutism'.
The appeal of RFK jr or even Rogan is the psychological needs they fulfill, not because they get anyone closer to Truth. But because they offer simple intuitive answers in a seemingly incomprehensible world. They offer a sense of agency and control, and a sense of community.
Scientific reasoning is only possible when people operate in good faith, are transparent, are solely operating in pursuit of truth, and never remove themselves from doubt.
The goals of political media (or “political-ISH media”) like Rogan is not truth-seeking ... but meaning-seeking, pleasure-seeking, community-seeking.
To show up there as a scientist to argue the merits of claims that are fundamentally NON-falsifiable (which all conspiracy theories are) is a fool's errand.
It’s like if I were a fish and I agreed to a duel. Folks. I'm going to lose but NOT because I'm a bad gunslinger, but because I CANT BREATHE ONCE I LEAVE THE WATER FFS (and I don't have hands)
POINT BEING: the purpose of MOST contemporary media has NOTHING TO DO WITH TRUTH. Think about it- How does Rogan HAVE all those dollars to pay a scientist to debate RFK? Because the purpose of contemporary media is attention-based profit. And in that arena, Rogan is winning.

By the way, to follow up on an idea above: Conspiracy theories give simple explanations for complex phenomena, and thus make some people feel reassured. Similarly, people want definitions of themselves. These don't even require conspiracy theories — which are elaborate stories that boil down to relatively simple explanations — but just dictionary-style definitions. These definitions can be used as part of conspiracy theories.

Christine Gritmon tweets: Obviously you know this already—but because if we go around loosening the definitions of male and female (and the expected roles and presentations thereof), it messes with the societal power imbalances that make them feel safe. They desire to feel 'defined.'
It's so blatantly obvious that tech billionaires are pushing RFK Jr. to weaken Joe Biden and try to usher in fascism with DeSantis. His biggest fans are all right wingers, which should be an immediate tell. They're trying to replicate Russia's oligarchy.
And the worst grifters who claim to be on the left are trying to replicate 2016 and do this all again with RFK Jr. and Cornell West. They don't want leftist policies. They are nihilists who just want to tear it all down without any vision for a better society.
Thomas Lecaque in a 5-tweet thread: Here's the thing, anti-vaxx conspiracy theories isn't just a bad idea, it's a toxic worldview, and consequently nothing else about RFK Jr.'s policies or plans or beliefs or rhetoric can be trusted. Once you adopt a far right anti science worldview, all your other beliefs are tainted. You think you could trust him on fiscal policy or foreign policy or public healthcare or literally anything else? No, no you couldn't. So no one needs to debate him, once you adopt magical thinking in service of getting kids killed by preventable illness you don't get to demand to be treated like a good faith adult in the room. Oh and asshole podcast hosts and billionaires demanding you debate him actually makes him infinitely LESS serious. If other people have to scream 'debate him bro' on Twitter it's because he's not a serious person and the adults in the room all know it.
Michael Hobbes, two-tweet thread: 'Why won't you debate?!' is such a perfect distillation of the dumb-guy's-idea-of-a-smart-guy ideology that has taken over American culture. No effort to discover the truth, understand the research or listen to experts. Just the hollow fetishization of counterintuitive 'ideas' and endless argument. *Actual* smart people can acknowledge the gaps in science and move forward anyway. Vaccines work. Shut the fuck up.
Ben Collins tweets: As president, I will replace double blind studies with debates against Joe Rogan. America's No. 1 problem, erectile dysfunction, will be cured in my lifetime.
Nate Silver tweets: Turning down a 'debate me' challenge isn't the own that people think. Having rhetorical skills in an adversarial format before a large audience is a nice but fairly niche skill that doesn't really correlate with underlying accuracy or really even courage of one's convictions.
It's like: sometimes I've been tempted to publicly challenge someone whom I'm in a statistical argument with to a poker match. And believe me, I'd be thrilled to play and I'd have a big edge. But I've also spent 10k+ hours playing poker. It's not exactly a neutral playing field.

When one commenter seemed not to understand Silver's analogy, another paraphrased it:

A live debate between a professional conversationalist and a research professor, not to mention when it’s on the professional conversationalist’s home turf, is extremely lopsided in favor of the conversationalist, regardless of the factual evidence.

In other words, Joe Rogan knows his side has a big advantage, completely apart from the factual evidence.

Sometimes at least one of the proposed interlocutors is a bad person

Seth Abramson: FFS this explains literally everything. If you give RFK Jr. the time of day after learning that he’s advised by the biggest ratf*ckers in the MAGA cult—Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone—just admit you’re a rabid Trumpist interning with a psycho psyop collab
It’s so transparent: Rogan needs self-styled MAGA alphas for money; Musk needs a GOP White House to do the borderline illegal anti-monopolistic garbage he wants to do with “X”; all these charlatans have an angle for supporting actual lunatic RFK Jr., and in every case it is money
Radley Balko tweets: Fun to think about backslapping tech billionares amplifying RFK Jr. to amuse themselves while driving by the street that's still closed because an unhinged man radicalized by the kind of 5G paranoia RFK peddles flattened two blocks of my city with a bomb.
Hell, even the bomber had the decency to avoid injuring other people. RFK Jr. isn't just a crank, he's a crank whose ideas could kill millions. This smarmy tech/podcast bro effort to elevate him is one of the ugliest, most cynical episodes in US politics in quite a while.
Seth Abramson tweets: The Hotez-Rogan-Musk silliness in a nutshell: 1. Experts of whatever political stripe should always be willing to debate other experts of whatever political stripe. 2. Experts should never debate abject fools posing as experts—because they haven’t earned experts’ time/attention.
Those who call Hotez a coward or charlatan for not immediately agreeing to play PR games with Rogan, Musk and RFK Jr. are just trolls whose toxic-masculine bullsh*t makes them think every man can be persuaded by calling him a chicken. They don’t know how to *earn* attention. When Tucker Carlson wanted to debate me on his show I said no—instantly—despite knowing it would’ve afforded me significant attention and (eventually) money. Why did I say no? Because we should never demean ourselves by debating people who haven’t earned our time or attention. Hotez owes Rogan, Musk, and RFK Jr. *nothing*. They haven’t earned anyone’s time/attention—let alone an expert’s time/attention—on the subject of vaccines. And Hotez owes Rogan’s audience nothing because it *wants* to be lied to about vaccines. RFK Jr. is doing that just fine. I get secondhand embarrassment watching grown-ass men like Musk and Rogan humiliate themselves on topics of import for years—insisting they know better than experts—only to beg experts to “debate” them for money. They should crawl back into their rich-boy safe spaces, instead.
If you think an expert refusing to debate a nonexpert for cash proves themselves a liar—or that they don’t care about charity, or that they can’t substantiate their expertise—you‘re a goon who lacks critical thinking skills and should avoid thinking and walking simultaneously. I understand it’s hard for stupid people to know they’re stupid—so I *do* have empathy for avid fans of Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. But at a certain point you’ve had it explained to you by experts *why* you’re stupid so many times that your recalcitrance becomes a character flaw. The armchair alphas who think they know more about vaccines than those who’ve studied them for decades are the same people who falsely told everyone VAERS is a database of confirmed adverse post-vaccine events and *kept saying so* after they were told that was laughably wrong. Hotez made a mistake when he went on Rogan’s show the first time, but can be forgiven because he’s a doctor not a PR expert and at the time was rightly desperate to get accurate data to *any* audience he could. But at *this* point neither Rogan nor Musk deserve his attention.
Rogan is an expert on MMA—that’s it. I’d listen to him on that topic. Musk *also* has areas of expertise: (1) sealioning (Google it); (2) gaslighting; (3) destroying companies; (4) bad parenting; (5) taking credit for others’ good ideas; (6) cult construction and management. If you’re listening to Rogan on any subject other than MMA, congratulations—he played you. You’re now his cash register. Just so, if you listen to *Elon Musk* on any subject beyond those I listed above, you’re yet another mark for the richest man on Earth, congratulations. The list of subjects on which I know nothing is virtually endless, but let’s take woodworking as an example. What kind of a****** would I be if I went around demanding that woodworkers interface with me as an equal? Rogan and Musk are the worst kind of fools: arrogant ones. Everybody really has to think about this: what’s happening here is that Rogan and Musk are *so* rich and *so* privileged and *so* out of touch with consequences that they’d rather see hundreds of thousands die than have their Big Important Feelings not be publicly validated.
I’ve no idea if Rogan and Musk were always unwell. Maybe so, maybe not. But both have been poisoned by wealth and celebrity into a level of toxic narcissism that’s galactically cringeworthy to any observer not so affected. It’s tragic, embarrassing, and profoundly dangerous. If these men had friends rather than cultists, an intervention would’ve happened a long time ago. So my question has nothing to do with Hotez debating a crank, but whether Rogan and Musk *chose* to have no authentic friends or did it just happen? It affects how I judge them. Also this: while lawyers can frame facts/precedent differently—it’s key to our adversarial justice system—and scientists may have slightly different reads on how some data project forward, debating anything subject to the scientific method is lunacy.
So if your big issue today is being mystified at why Dr. Hotez isn’t eagerly agreeing to debate a random moron about vaccines, understand that you have one or more of these issues: 1) You lack critical thinking skills. 2) You’re in a cult. 3) Ideologically you’re a fascist. For the rest of us, the prescription is simple: determine the expert consensus on any question that interests you. Everything else—especially circus sideshows orchestrated by rich men obsessed with their Big Important Feelings—is just *noise* that wastes your valuable time.

The interlocutors

They have to share enough common ground to have a conversation. They need to share the same sense of reality.

Richard Nanian tweets: I've taught logical argument for over 20 years. I tell students argument is the fundamental skill of civilization, even ahead of agriculture. It’s not conflict but a way to manage conflict. But it’s only productive when the participants share certain epistemological assumptions.
Thomas Lecaque (June 19, 2023): The problem with debating people in the parallel reality is that your facts won't impact them and so the appearance of the debate will be that you're losing, even when they are unhinged.

As well as the same values intertwined with that sense of reality.

David Frum tweets: 'Rabbi, I'll offer you $100,000 to come onto my popular podcast to debate whether the plague is or is not caused by Jews poisoning wells.'

Each of them has to have a relevant knowledge base, even if those bases have significant differences.

Dave Vetter: Musk, Rogan and the entire Debate Me Bro community are just this cartoon. Cartoon says: We'll talk to a well researched and respected expert...And in the interest of balance we will also talk to an idiot.
Hamilton Nolan tweets: I know you did a PhD and wrote a book on this complex topic but if you don't debate my horse on stage at the county fair, why should I believe you? my horse can clomp his hoof once for yes and twice for no

If the interlocutors interrupt and talk over each other, then change the topic, how can that be winning?

Clan Malkavian parody acct tweet: That's literally how Ben Shapiro does it. Because when he's in a 'debate', he doesn't give you time to dissect and break down why he is wrong. He just interrupts and changes topics. But there are literally hours and hours of videos out there of why he's wrong.
Talia Lavin: I was president of my high school yeshiva league debate club and I won every time with minimal prep by Talking Fast Using Big Words. thats it. that's the skill. the merit of ideas has nothing to do with it. it's a wpm contest.

Why does the interlocutor with less expertise pressure the more knowledgeable one to debate?

Why would a non-scientist want to debate a scientist about science?

Mikel Jollett tweets: Instead of bringing scientists on podcasts, how about we force podcasters to prove they can do basic science? Do you know what 'double-blind' means, my dude? Can you define p-value, bro? Without googling it, give me the basics of polymerization. Can't do it? You lose.
John Scalzi tweets June 18, 2023: Why won't that beef-witted podcaster write a peer-reviewed scientific paper? What is he scared of? Is he too much of a coward to present his findings to a group of experts in the field for their critical examination? Why is he hiding?

The audience

A mass audience doesn't share a scientist's expertise either. They may not even share the same awareness of what facts might be relevant, fidelity to truth about those basic areas, or active pursuit of advanced knowledge.

Thomas Lecaque: You're an expert when your ideas have been reality tested by other experts, not because you engage in a social media yellfest with a public that doesn't share the same objective reality you do.

They do, however, become zealous, to the point of harassing the participants outside the debate.

Alex Rosen tweets: I confronted @PeterHotez and asked why he is too scared to debate @RobertKennedyJr on the @joerogan podcast! In response, Elad Nehorai tweets: They came to his house. Of course. This is the thing about the “debate me” culture. It’s abuse posing as intellectualism. They don’t give one sh*% about debates: what they demand is access to you whether you agree to it or not. It’s about power and domination, nothing else.
Amy Maxmen, PhD tweets: 'Debate me' is not communication. 'Debate me' is an invitation for scientists to subject themselves to severe harassment, doxxing & death threats. >32 kids died in Samoa after RFK Jr visited & convinced parents that measles vaccines are dangerous, 2000+ sick.

If someone's making unfounded claims of knowledge and epistemic purity, public debate can be a performative response to help smoke that out. It doesn't "resolve intellectual disputes." It resolves annoying performativity disputes.

Nate Silver, June 23, 2023 tweets: There's a robust middle ground between not wanting to engage in a theatrical debate against people with more experience and adopting a posture of 'I'm a Scientist and therefore Pure as the Driven Snow' (particularly if you often tailgate in the politics/science middle lane). I've tried to take a principled stand against 'debate me, bro' as being a good way to resolve intellectual disputes. It's not. But there's a degree of grenade-throwing behind the wall of credentialism, and other motte-and-bailey tactics, beyond which it becomes more appropriate.

The Political News Media Still Doesn’t Know How To Interview Trump, So I’m Going To Show Them, Todd Lombardo, Substack, September 26, 2023:

"In my previous Substack, I described four theories about how the political news media is getting it wrong in covering MAGA more broadly, and Donald Trump specifically: bothsidesism, doomsdaying, access journalism, and fascist-normalizing."

In this post, these ideas are applied retroactively to a Trump interview.

RFK Jr. will run as an independent in 2024

In October 2023, RFK Jr. announced he would stop challenging Biden in the primary and instead run as an independent.

Robert Reich writes, distinguishing the father from the son (Substack, October 10, 2023):

"I worked in Robert F. Kennedy’s Senate office in 1967. ... Robert F. Kennedy would never have suggested or even thought that a deadly virus was targeted at certain races. He wouldn’t have repeated the trope, dating at least to the Middle Ages, that Jews unleashed a plague on non-Jews. ... RFK Jr is not an independent. He is a right-wing tool being used to help elect Trump. His candidacy has been backed by a PAC that also funds Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos."

www.motherjones.com/politics/202... Obviously this is not a serious person, but it’s amazing you can just run on what amounts to forced institutionalization of neurodivergent people in 2024

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— David is a Downer (@davidlanzrath.bsky.social) Jul 25, 2024 at 3:43 PM

RFK Jr. says he placed a dead bear cub in Central Park 10 years ago, Aaron Pellish, CNN, August 4, 2024

Do Republicans like debate?

I dunno, maye they do, but then why does their leading candidate insist on no debates?

Trump Demands That The RNC Stop Hosting Debates For His Rivals Or Be Revamped: NOW!!! The coup-attempting former president has skipped all three debates to date but has been getting more agitated about them as the GOP primaries draw closer. S.V. Date, Huffington Post, Nov 20, 2023.

They never wanted to debate, just make unfunny jokes...

Joe Rogan Mocks Trans People And COVID In Netflix Stand-Up, And The Internet Is Fed Up: The controversial podcaster's new comedy special, "Burn the Boats," is being met with criticism. Jazmin Tolliver, HuffPost, Aug 5, 2024

Read this article by Julia Serano

Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth Is Neither New nor Experimental: A Timeline and Compilation of Studies (32-min read), Julia Serano, Medium, May 16, 2023.

The article came to my attention because she tweeted on June 19, 2023: "since we're talking about anti-vaxxers & calls to "debate me", I will add that anti-trans activists use this exact same playbook. you can't "debate" a scientific consensus, b/c it's not based on one study & can't be undone w/individual "questions/concerns""

RFK is now doing some complicated spoiler stuff

I regret to inform you the RFK Jr. is back at SCOTUS, this time asking to be taken off the Wisconsin ballot — after previously, unsuccessfully, asking to be added to the NY ballot. He claims he's going to do something at SCOTUS re: Michigan, too. www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docke...

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— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) October 24, 2024 at 12:20 PM

77 Nobel Prize Winners Write Message To The Senate: Don’t Confirm RFK Jr. "The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve — not threaten — these important and highly respected institutions." Nick Visser, HuffPost, Dec 10, 2024

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