Here we go again. “Debate me!” shriek the loony antivaxxers; “Why should I,” say the scientists; “That proves you’re wrong,” whine the usual crowd of gullible idiots.
The inciting incident in this case was the king of the fuckin’ online idiots, Joe Rogan, who invited batshit anti-vaxxer loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr onto his show, listened to him respectfully, and then agreed thoroughly with him, to the point of telling respectable and highly qualified scientist Peter Hotez to come on his show and debate him.
Last Thursday, Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who inked an exclusive deal with Spotify for $200 million, hosted Kennedy for a three-hour conversation. Kennedy told Rogan’s more than 10 million listeners that “vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” Rogan, a comedian and former host of Fear Factor, spent the entire episode validating Kennedy’s views. Kennedy was presented as a brave truth-teller, standing up to powerful forces. Anyone who doesn’t accept Kennedy’s conspiracy theories, according to Rogan, is unable to think for themselves.
Kennedy spent the better part of an hour rehashing an article he wrote in 2005, which falsely claimed that childhood vaccines are linked to autism. The article was so flawed it was ultimately retracted by the outlet that published it, Salon. “[C]ontinued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do,” Salon’s editor wrote.
In the piece, Kennedy relied extensively on the work of Mark Geier, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was revoked by Maryland in 2011. Geier pushed the vaccine-autism link as a frequent expert witness. He also misrepresented his credentials and developed “a ‘protocol’ for treating autism that involved injecting children with the drug that is used to chemically castrate sex offenders at a cost of upwards of $70,000 per year.”
Naturally, one of Rogan’s army of cranks showed up at Hotez’s house to taunt him.
A prominent vaccine scientist said he was accosted outside of his home after a Twitter exchange with podcaster Joe Rogan, who challenged him to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over the weekend.
“I just was stalked in front of my home by a couple of antivaxers taunting me to debate RFKJr.,” Houston-based scientist Peter Hotez tweeted Sunday.
The debate bros were pissed off because Hotez turned Rogan down. Among those debate bros was Elon Musk.
“He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted in response to Rogan, who claimed Hotez’s response was a “non answer.”
“I will add $150,000 to @joerogan’s wager so now $250,000 can go to charity and the public can hear an open debate on an important topic,” billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman tweeted.
Refusing to debate an ideologue does not prove you’re wrong. That’s not how logic works. Upping the ante does not change the problem with debate. The simple fact is that RFK is a deluded kook with a whole battery of bad ideas in his head. He thinks WiFi causes disease, and Rogan agrees.
RFK Jr.: Wifi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.
Rogan: How does wifi open up your blood-brain barrier?
RFK Jr.: Now you’ve gone beyond my expertise.
Utterly nuts. Bonkers to the nth degree. These two guys might be qualified to operate a public circle-jerk, but they know nothing about the science, so what is to be gained by debating them? That is not a way to resolve any scientific issue. It has always been a problem that glib liars have an automatic edge in debate.
The Sophists highlight the problem with public debates: they are easily gamed with lies, rhetorical skill, and clever wordplay. In order for a debate to actually be worthwhile, both participants must be sincerely dedicated to finding the truth; if one side is not committed to the truth, they will have an advantage, because it is much easier to spout falsehoods than it is to refute them. The technique of spouting too many nonsense points to refute has its own name, called the Gish Gallop, after a young earth creationist who used the technique to criticize evolutionary theory.
The Gish Gallop is effective in live debates largely because the audience does not have enough specialized knowledge to ascertain the validity of a criticism. Science is hard, complicated, and nuanced; when a dishonest debater spouts a dozen nonsensical points, their opponent will not have time to adequately address each of these points. This can give an audience the impression, based simply on the volume of arguments on each side, that the dishonest debater has won the argument.
A live debate is also extremely limited because the participants do not have time to do research to respond to an opponent’s comment. Even experts in a field usually do not have all the relevant data for their field in their head to be recalled at a moment’s notice; again, the Gish Galloper has the advantage here, in that they are usually just providing a list of attacks and are not concerned with accuracy.
Rogan is a dangerous and malicious fraud with a gigantic audience and huge amounts of money, and there he is, spewing all this crap over the body politic, and they’re eating it up. We ought to be terrified. We also not to grant him a millimeter of respect and credibility.
Way back in the 1980s and 90s I debated a number of “scientific” creationists and ID “theorists,” including a highly publicized debate on WF Buckley’s show, “Firing Line.” I thought those debates served a purpose at a time when scientific voices almost absent from the public square while these critics of evolution dominated discussion:
But the problem with debate is that once you step on the stage you’re established an apparent equivalence between two points of view, even if one of them is absolute nonsense. That’s exactly the case with RFK Jr and his anti-Vax arguments. Hotez is wise to decline. This would be a trap!
Do any of these wankers have any idea what an actual, formal debate involves?
As PZ knows from experience, debates with these imbeciles bears no relation to a useful formal civilized debate, and rapidly becomes a petty, childish irrational slap fight. Dr. Hotez should just laugh in their faces and go about his valuable work As I often say, dealing with these pseudo-science idiots is like trying to reason with a rattlesnake. Sadly, too many people cannot and/or will not research for facts and use logic to establish their looney tunes opinions.
I would watch a debate with the following topic:
Resolved: glib liars have an automatic edge in debate
@1 chigau (違う) said: Do any of these wankers have any idea what an actual, formal debate involves?
I reply: Thanks and good for you, you beat me to that important point
Gotta love the WiFi hype, which is a standard part of any of their Gish gallops. Of course, the smarter models, both of them, can then pivot skillessly on to cellular phone radiation.
Ignoring that great radio frequency noise source we orbit around, which blasts out far more RF energy over most of the spectrum, because of hand wave.
https://physicsopenlab.org/2020/10/25/solar-radio-emission/
As in, if WiFi and cellular signals are so lethal, we’re already long extinct by much stronger solar radiation and obviously our ancestors never should’ve stepped off of the Battlestar.
And being extinct, I see no value in debating the dead.
Although, I’m feeling quite spritely, for being a dead guy.
As for Musk, let’s look at his argument. Saying no is a non-answer. That’s more like a warning against dating him.
Circling back, it’s a wee bit difficult to give credence to those who advocate for drinking ground glass, aka silica gel powder, as a cure for mythical metals that are evil murder-death-kill chemicals, especially when one of the most demonized is the third most common metal in the earth’s crust. That metal, aluminum, being largely excreted unchanged if it is consumed, needs ridiculously large amounts to cause toxicity and well, see the stay on the Battlestar bullshit to counter their bullshit.
Especially when they pin their hats to aluminum being found in Alzheimer’s plaques, so is zinc, both are naturally found throughout the body in small quantities and zinc is necessary for that whole life thing.
Aluminum and copper and bears, oh my!
@1 kenmiller (who also has valuable experience here) said: t once you step on the stage you’re established an apparent equivalence between two points of view, even if one of them is absolute nonsense. That’s exactly the case with RFK Jr and his anti-Vax arguments. Hotez is wise to decline. This would be a trap!
I reply: I didn’t think of that ‘false equivalency’ flaw. Very good point.
You can absolutely debate these people but you need to be skilled at rhetoric. I disagree with the assessment that debates are useless. In fact, debates are one of the very very few ways you can actually make anti-vaxxers or idiots in general to listen to a portion of what you are saying. It’s one of the only ways you can break the information bubble people have created for themselves. The mistakes people make is to think that just because a person is a good scientist or very knowledgeable then they must be good debater.
Nobody cares if you or whomever scientist appears at an equal footing as a crank in a debate. At this day and age, nobody cares because the crank in question likely has a multi-million subscribed youtube channel while nobody is heard of your scientist guy.
The problem with debates is that they are prone to being swayed by rhetorical devices and catchy, memorable sound bites. And the spouting of high-sounding principles that seem unassailable at first hearing but crumble as you examine the implications and consequences, which you won’t have time to do while debating or listening to a debate.
And that’s where you open the door to all kinds of prejudices and cognitive biases and mistakes, without the ability to recognize them and think of ways to work around them, the only way I know of to get to something we can tentatively think of as some sort of truth.
Science, built on demonstrable, reproducible results and correct predictions, is how we work around those pitfalls. Scientific questions cannot, and should not, be settled by debate. Period. So piss off, junior.
@8 lotharloo said: You can absolutely debate these people but you need to be skilled at rhetoric. I disagree with the assessment that debates are useless
I reply: In my comment I did not call all debate useless, I was contrasting the ‘debating with a shouting baboon in a professional wrestling ring’ with “a useful formal civilized debate” . I have read the comments below a ‘debate’ video and most of the people are already fans of the ‘professional wrestler’ host and his pseudo-scientific carnival act. I don’t think a well reasoned ‘debate’ in these circumstances will change a significant number of already closed tiny minds.
These are lunatic fringers but unlike for example, the Flat Earthers, they aren’t harmless.
Antivaxxers kill.
This is a sometimes fatal medical delusion.
It’s estimated that during the Covid-19 pandemic, 330,000 antivaxxers died from…the Covid-19 virus in the USA.
It’s still happening right up until today.
Somewhere in the USA, an antivaxxer is on a vent or ECMO, and someone decided it was futile and they are going to turn it off and let them die.
The issue is Hotez’s point is that Kennedy is lying about the scientific literature and data; the resolution to this claim isn’t to put the two of them in a room to yell at eachother but for people able to understand the data and literature to review what it says and compare Kennedy’s claims.
The hardcore antivaxxers are actually a small part of the US population.
It’s 8%.
81% of the US population are vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus.
Just this morning, somebody on mastodon reminded us of the climate change “debate” segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where he showed how the 1-1 50-50 equal-time relationship that the debate form entails effectively equalizes things in the minds of the audience. Having seen it just be 1 on 1, the implication ALREADY is that the two sides are equal, and this has been something Conservatives have relied on for decades now, on just about every topic imaginable.
Debates of this sort can be useful if the venue is reasonably neutral. Having a debate on Rogan’s show is pointless, he isn’t close to a fair arbiter. Somebody on the show would get cut off at odd moments while RFK would get to speak freely and interrupt Hotez.
So who are the antivaxxers and what are they like.
I’d ask my antivaxxer neighbor but he died from the Covid-19 virus last winter.
(He was an idiot right wingnut.)
People have looked at this recently, so you don’t have to visit the cemeteries to ask the antivaxxers why they are…dead from a preventable infection.
It’s basically low education, low problem solving skills, and being a biased right wingnut.
Someone I know insists that the government cannot create jobs. As a federal employee, I said well, it created mine. At some point, I said that I cannot go on arguing with someone who gets his news from Fox. I spend all my time correcting misconceptions, and it’s exhausting.
I’ll go with the guy nobody has heard of to perform my brain surgery any day over Joe Rogan.
Debating at all is like arguing with a monkey that’s throwing shit at you. The monkey will always proclaim victory because you’re so full of shit that you’re covered in it.
WiFi obviously is an element of disease. Joe Rogan and his ilk, and Kennedy and his ilk, depend upon it as a vector for disease-ridden defective nervefirings (which are too incoherent to call “thought”).
The problem with debates is simple; Even under the best circumstances where both sides are debating in good faith, the assumption is that the audience are rational beings who, after listening to both sides, decides who’s right and wrong.
However, as we’ve seen time and time again, PEOPLE ARE NOT RATIONAL. Never have been, never will. As others have pointed out word games, charisma, and a desire to only hear what one wants to hear are far more persuasive than actual facts or logic.
Anyone going on Rogan should assert to no limits on supposed civility. Use the example of Rogan ranting about a primatologist being wrong “because vagina”. Come in being honest about using all of the appropriate negative feeling characterizations about the host, guest, and audience. Deny any decency to the environment up front and leave them appropriately scathed.
EDIT: …decides who is right and wrong.
They act like they are tough and they clearly aren’t with criticism so why pretend?
Trick the anti-science crowd to somehow enter debates with muslim apologists. Two belligerent, intellectually dishonest crowds fighting each other in the Thunderdome.
Ray Comfort vs David Hiqqatjou*.
And when one side gets exhausted, replace them with the Flat-Earthers.
The guy who openly says the example of Muhammed shows child marriage and slavery are OK. Not making this up.
Remember when all these debate bros were on our side—at least on science issues like vaccines? What a difference a decade and a fascist strongman president makes.
Rogan has staff and access to researchers who could clue him in. His ignorance is by choice.
OT
Andrew Tate has been formally indicted on several criminal counts, including charges of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to exploit women.
Some good news at last.
Now back to the other category of dishonest people.
I recently saw Joe Rogan described as “Ken Ham for atheists”. Just thought I’d share.
Debates are bad, but clear public responses to this nonsense must be made. The difficulty is getting the responses in front of Joe Rogan’s audience.
Same problem with the creationists etc.
Akira MacKenzie@#20:
The problem with debates is simple; Even under the best circumstances where both sides are debating in good faith, the assumption is that the audience are rational beings who, after listening to both sides, decides who’s right and wrong.
As you say, the premise of the concept of debating is goofy. Are we supposed to pretend that the audience are ignorant of the topic? Or that they are, just now, on the spot forming their opinions based on the facts being cleverly explained by the debaters? If we’re dealing with facts and forming opinions from the facts and the way they are presented are we so lazy we can’t do our own research and thinking? Or what if one of the debaters has a history od dishonesty? How can a rational person sit through being Gish galloped and not recognize it for a dishonest debater’s trick.
I once watched a debate where William Lane Craig earnestly trotted out Kalâm in spite of the fact that he must know it has been refuted many times, and how. “Oh, so the game is to sneak an old lie past the audience?” Imagine if Blondlot’s N-rays had been disproved, but he went around debating about them as if they were real, knowing they weren’t. Is the game to find an audience ignorant enough to pretend to fall for careworn, hollow, tropes that had been imploded 2,000 years ago? Or to pretend that Gish had made his point in spite of lying and manipulating as the core of his intellectual approach?
I am reminded of the Oxford Union debate between James Baldwin and William Buckley Jr: was anyone there actually prepared to buy Buckley’s argument that slavery ultimately benefitted American Black people?! Holy shit! Anyone in that room that did not already understand the topic, and therefore why it was not debatable, was just there to enjoy the intellectual blood-sport of watching infantry in open terrain subjected to artillery. I mean, watching Baldwin massacre a pseudo-intellectual popinjay was fun, but the topic was never open to debate.
I’ve done debates back in the day but now i think a co-written position paper might be useful but a debate forces everyone involved including the audience, to lie.
RFK Jr is apparently running for the Democratic ticket in 2024. I have difficulty believing it’s for real, but … wtf.
numerobis: the strategy of keeping non-reactionaries divided and siphoning off votes from the Biden column to ensure another minority president gets elected is VERY real. Nader in 2000, Stein in 2016, and now this clown.
So the ghost of Andrew Wakefield is still making the rounds.
Don’t forget to boycott and despise Spotify for hosting him and paying him $200 million.
@33, alas, Wakefield’s still making the rounds. Were he only a ghost.
JM@15– ‘Debates of this sort can be useful if the venue is reasonably neutral.’
lotharloo@8– ‘You can absolutely debate these people but you need to be skilled at rhetoric. I disagree with the assessment that debates are useless. In fact, debates are one of the very very few ways you can actually make anti-vaxxers or idiots in general to listen to a portion of what you are saying.’
No, no, no. I admire your belief in the fair competition of ideas, but this is an idealised model of debate that is demonstrably false in practice. I can say this because back when I was in my 20s, this was exactly what I believed too. But experience has taught me that debates if this sort are never useful, even in a neutral venue. If there is strong evidence for something and pig-ignorant liars refuse to accept it, then putting a pig-ignorant liar up on stage with an honest, informed opponent automatically gives the liar an unfair advantage. And I’m not saying that rhetorical skills are unimportant, but any format that elevates rhetoric to dominance is a bad one for promoting science. And I note that even great pro-science rhetoricians like Sagan, Cox, and Carson were not interested in stage debates. Bill Nye tried it once and later realised that he, too, was just a cog in the strategy that gave Ken Ham a big funding boost to build the Ark Encounter, a facility that Nye himself described as ‘bad for the commonwealth of Kentucky and bad for scientists based in Kentucky and bad for the U.S, and I’m not joking, bad for the world.’ But he unintentionally helped build it.
The debate format has nothing to do with establishing truths or promoting awareness. If you want information and evidence, then the best format available today is the website that refers to the literature for people who want to read deeper. These resources already exist in abundance. Don’t debate, point to the online resources. And if the person won’t go to those resources or is not persuaded by them, then debate sure as hell won’t work.
There’s a reason scientists stopped doing creationist debates. They used to. A lot. It was common in the 70s and 80s and I attended some as an undergrad in Melbourne (although it was never as big a thing in Australia as the US, which is why Ham moved). The scientists were using that exact line of thought: better to debate than let the lies go unanswered. I agreed with them. But guess what? It didn’t help. In fact, the creationists were using the debates to hone their rhetoric. They would repeat lies that had been refuted at previous debates over and over again, tinkering with the phrasing for increasing persuasiveness, like email scammers testing out different wordings against response rates. I can’t remember who, but one of the scientists who used to debate creationists started responding to a repeated lie by showing video during the debate of the creationist using this exact lie in previous debates, having the lie refuted, accepting the refutation…and now repeating the same lie in the same debate in a different town. Even being shown these blatant, premeditated lies made no difference to the audience. I think this was the same scientist who discovered that the debates were a great fundraising exercise for his opponent. He was receiving a small honorarium to pay for transport and accommodation while the creationist was whipping up local church communities to attend, using the debate as a headliner for a revival meeting, and raking in a small fortune in tax-free donations every time.
And this is why today you won’t find scientists willing to debate creationists, anti-vaxxers, anti-AGWists, etc. They know from experience that the debate format is counter-productive for the purpose of persuasion and actively monetizes anti-scientific movements. RFK Jr is probably making bank with every appearance even if it’s not in direct payment. And this is why the bros want debate. Even more than the attention and false equivalence they would enjoy, it allows them to monetize.
I can’t think of a single example of a stage debate that led to broader acceptance of the more scientific or rational position in the community. I welcome counter-examples. (It might be tempting to bring up the famous 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce debate, but if so be aware that the standard version of the story is misleading and there is little evidence that it changed anyone’s mind — subsequent correspondence from the participants shows that all six debaters came away convinced they had an emphatic victory, and observers believed the winning side was the one that confirmed their prior beliefs. And it was to an audience almost entirely made up of Oxford academics who came to the debate already familiar with Origin of the Species and Wilberforce’s counter-arguments. It did, admittedly, give us Huxley’s famous line about preferring an ape as a grandfather, although even that is a much-polished version of what Huxley probably said in the moment.)
I forgot to add the Onion’s take: If Pigs Are So Smart, Why Won’t They Debate Me?
I’d also point out that Rogan and RFKJnr will benefit financially from this debate, far more that Peter Hotez ever will. Even if he accepted their stupid blood money.
To be fair, is there ever a time the debate bro’s aren’t wound up? Faux- outrage is their bread and butter.
The problem is that those hardcore antivaxxers are impacting the decision making of a much larger percentage of the population — the vaccine hesitant. In the early days of the Covid-19, that number was as high as 30% conservative parts of the country, with some studies showing a general vaccine hesitancy of up to 50%. And while 80% of the US population might be vaccinated, the uptake of the bivalent booster is only 23%. While the receding threat of Covid-19 waves is clearly a major factor in people’s decision making, the continued demonization of the Covid vaccines is also having an effect.
Most alarmingly, in many countries there’s been a significant drop in the confidence of the general public in childhood vaccinations since the pandemic started, especially among less educated, more vulnerable populations. The antivaxxer’s lies are indeed having an effect far beyond their own small community.
tacitus, your comment is revealing.
If you grant what you quoted (which you implicitly do) then you should be aware that 81+8=89. Which means the “much larger percentage” of “vaccine hesitant” to which you refer must, at most, comprise the remaining 11%.
10 @shermanj:
I agree with you. Debating anything at Joe Rogan’s podcast would be playing against a stacked deck. I guess it is technically doable but you would be making your life harder.
@36 chrislawson:
I agree and that’s why you should put them against an informed opponent with great rhetorical skills and a lot of experience in debating.
I cannot comment on Carson but the other two are good educators and explainers but I don’t think they are very good debaters.
I would bet most scientists are terrible debaters and for good reason. They don’t practice debating, their work has nothing to do with debates and they do not become great scientists for having great debating skills.
There is a common misconception that have existed among the scientists and generally the more educated and academically oriented people where they think if people are uneducated or misinformed, then the way to correct it is to present them with the correct information. This assumption is false. For example, Naomi Oreskes talks about this in the context of global warming. You cannot convince a GW denier by giving them a list of factually correct and peer-reviewed information. This apparently leads a lot of people to the conclusion that it’s useless to talk to GW deniers but that’s not the case. It’s just that the solution that you think should work does not work but it doesn’t mean that no solution works.
Marcus Ranum@26 I have a bit of a hard time believing Rogan has an actual staff and researchers. He seems like the kind of guy who thinks he’s too smart for that kind of stuff.
lotharloo@43–
Yes the research on changing entrenched errors of thought is confronting, but the debate format doesn’t fix anything. I would love to be wrong on this. If the debate format was an effective tool against misinformation I would be head of its cheersquad. As things stand though, the challenge is this: show me the great debaters you speak of. Show me the debates that convinced people to abandon their anti-vax, anti-AGW, etc. positions. Show me how to have a debate without monetizing the liars (remember they can monetize completely independently of any direct payment for debating).
Or to sum up: https://www.angryflower.com/1366.html
Never debate an idiot, for they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. Looking forward to iron lungs and mumps-induced sterility.