Exactly. There's some good stuff, but the show has also become a podium for pseudo-intellectuals to pawn off bad ideas and completely misrepresent fact without being challenged.
People also eat up the "you can make up your own mind about what people say" argument. But, what fraction of a percent of people have the time to go out and do their own professional grade research after a controversial guest? What percentage of that can even effectively perform objective research? For me, the whole point of a media platform like that is to do some of that filtering for me or present a balanced view so that I don't get taken by some guy spouting complete BS without getting called out for it.
Could you give us some examples of misrepresented facts? I've only listened to a few episodes but most of the interview content seemed like stories and opinions rather than something represented as factual.
How does one distinguish a pseudo-intellectual from a real intellectual?
He did spend time talking about "interdimensional pedophiles" with Alex Jones [1].
> How does one distinguish a pseudo-intellectual from a real intellectual?
Well, that's certainly not something I'm qualified to answer. However, I was reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" recently and one of the heuristics for identifying if there can be real expertise formed in a subject or not is if it has regularity. IE, you can't have expertise if the outputs of some process are dominated by chance. I'd start there.
The problem is people who use cargo cult science as a selling point for their particular ideas which are usually political in nature or maybe have to do with startups or the stock market. Things that if they were a truly decided science, we wouldn't be arguing over in the first place. They take bad results with tiny sample sizes and pawn them off as fact and then because "facts don't care about your feelings" they feel justified calling anybody that doesn't believe in whatever it is they're selling an idiot.
If you want us to take your concerns seriously you'll have to come up with a better example than Alex Jones. I'm not going to waste my time listening to that episode but I highly doubt that Joe Rogan ever claimed his crackpot views were facts. And I don't think Jones was ever presented as an intellectual.
> They take bad results with tiny sample sizes and pawn them off as fact and then because "facts don't care about your feelings" they feel justified calling anybody that doesn't believe in whatever it is they're selling an idiot.
It's possible, but history's repeated proof that behavioral modification by repetition works (we call it brainwashing in more extreme contexts) and that fan worship is real suggests that yours is not a meaningfully valuable rebuttal. We have facts on the ground showing that people absorb what they hear in tragically large numbers, so saying "but technically they don't have to" is both not useful and probably also just flat out wrong.
If a tragically large numbers of people are really unable to consider two sides of an issue it implies that democracy itself is not viable. Even Spotify's execs answer to the board, which is elected by shareholders, are they somehow immune from this fan worship?
> If a tragically large numbers of people are really unable to consider two sides of an issue it implies that democracy itself is not viable
Your use of "viable" here is imprecise. Democracy isn't doing the right thing or the best thing or the good thing or the thing that helps the most people. Democracy is just asking people to pick. It says nothing about the influences that drive them to their choices or ascribe a moral quotient to the outcome of those influences. It is perfectly viable for doing what it does. Many people would indeed argue that it's not very good at doing the other things.
> Even Spotify's execs answer to the board, which is elected by shareholders, are they somehow immune from this fan worship?
Nobody is immune. Not one of us. That's why it upsets us when people we admire fall from grace. But board members are far more likely to be people the stockholders have never heard of before than identifiable personalities.
Hypothetical side question: Do you own stock and participate in shareholder votes? I do, and I have zero clue who any of the people are when those questions come up. They may as well be asking me to pick a hand.
I do participate in shareholder votes and typically just perform a quick online search for each board member candidate. I concede that it is insufficient to really get to know them.
Given that, shouldn't we trust corporations less rather than more. Why are we pushing for corps to make decisions about what we are allowed to see and hear?
> Given that, shouldn't we trust corporations less rather than more. Why are we pushing for corps to make decisions about what we are allowed to see and hear?
I'm going to loop back to your previous comment and address a problem that is
also related to this question...
> If a tragically large numbers of people are really unable to consider two
sides of an issue
There's this common trope that we should consider all sides of an issue. But
issues don't have sides. People do. People have personal preferences (sometimes
correctly called opinions) and data, usually partial, and then they make
decisions (sometimes incorrectly also called opinions) about what to do given
their personal preferences.
When we talk about "sides of an issue", we're almost always secretly talking
about people who want different things. We're almost never talking about people
with the same personal preferences figuring out different ways of working with
the data.
Calling different base desires "different sides of an issue" is in practice
extremely insidiously harmful. Almost universally, the preference differences
that lead to real conflict are the splits between selfish malice and
beneficence and between science and fundamentalist religious antiscience.
Sometimes those two sets strongly overlap, other times not. It's "I don't want
to provide someone else with healthcare if they can't pay for it." It's "Gay
people shouldn't be allowed to marry." It's "We shouldn't teach evolution in
schools." It's "Drink bleach to cure illness."
Calling selfishness, malice, and antiscience just "a side of the issue" gives
the behavior a clean facade, normalizing it. It short-circuits honesty and
gives a too convenient way to mask antisocial preferences during public
discourse. "Men shouldn't be allowed to marry other men" is one example of an
antisocial preference, but good luck getting any person who says it to agree
that the idea is homophobic.
Talking about "considering sides of an issue" also puts shysterism and
gaslighting on equal footing as honest discourse. And those should never be put
on equal footing because they are inherently predatory. The world is hard
enough without being constantly bombarded by peddlers of fraudulent truthiness.
Ok, now back to this question...
> Given that, shouldn't we trust corporations less rather than more.
Less/more than what? Less/more than you trust Joe Rogan? He's the one who decided that they could buy editorial control, not them.
> Why are we pushing for corps to make decisions about what we are allowed to see and hear?
We aren't and they aren't. They're making decisions about what they distribute. That's not the same thing. If Joe Rogan doesn't like it, he can leave instead of taking their 100 million dollars. I for one am always glad to have another entity decide to stop giving broad audience reach to antisocial, selfish, malicious, or antiscience idea peddlers.
It's a total mix with Joe Rogan, on the one hand he's had Alex Jones on his show with the two of them talking about taking drugs to communicate with aliens in another dimension, but on the other hand I thought he did a pretty good job interviewing Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders before the democratic primaries started. The quality of any single one of his episodes is largely driven by the quality of his guest. I honestly think Joe fills the role of an average guy asking the kind of questions most average guys would ask very well. He also generally sounds sincere, curious and unbiased when he brings people on his show. Yeah someone like Alex Jones can take the show way off the rails, but on the other hand he's interviewed people like Edward Snowden, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders and had very interesting and thoughtful conversations with them. In fact when it comes to non-mainstream political candidates like Andrew Yang, Joe was one of the few people to give them more than a few minutes to articulate their platform.
I still don't get why Yang is not a "mainstream" candidate. He was by far the sanest (and smartest) candidate in the lineup, and the DNC instead chose two of the least likable people to ever run, one of whom can't remember what office he's running for from time to time.
Dude is also the best long-form interviewer on YouTube, bar none, and not afraid to invite controversial people and ask them controversial questions. He can peddle Viagra for all I care, I'm still going to listen to his interviews. But not if Spotify has any "editorial control" over them.
I think he is a good conversationalist and funny but a pretty bad interviewer. hes also largely an idiot (a fact he regularly admits), hes more goop salesmen than thought provoking journalist but i think that is what he wants.
He's just realistic. 99% of people are "idiots" by that definition. Twitter and the press are full of people who take themselves really seriously but turn out to be total idiots upon further scrutiny. I think it's undeniable, however, that he's really good at what he does. Spotify deal aside, wouldn't have 9 million subscribers otherwise.
thats where his skill as a conversationalist comes in. he speaks well especially to the common man. i do not think, personally, he is very intelligent or 'smart' but in terms of what he does he is. hes often incorrect about things he talks about, but it doesnt matter in terms of entertainment. realistic is too general of an assumption, common is more apt. he is great at what he does, but i dont see him as an authority on much (where i think many others do)
People also eat up the "you can make up your own mind about what people say" argument. But, what fraction of a percent of people have the time to go out and do their own professional grade research after a controversial guest? What percentage of that can even effectively perform objective research? For me, the whole point of a media platform like that is to do some of that filtering for me or present a balanced view so that I don't get taken by some guy spouting complete BS without getting called out for it.