[greenduck]

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.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kv9qd/the-joe-rogan-expe...

[nradov]

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.

Do you have any credible examples?

[Fjolsvith]

> 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.

You've just described mainstream media nowadays.