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.
I personally do not consider all 'sides' of an issue to be equal, and am capable of considering an argument without normalizing it.
I believe we are already inundated with media sources that amplify a single worldview and that is extremely harmful. Somehow considering or even listening to a different idea has become viewed as weakness and something to be avoided.
Rogan is one of the few that has an audience of people with widely varying preferences. He also does not give every fringe/extreme idea or person equal time. Instead he has guests on that are already noteworthy and have an audience. I find some of those episodes the most interesting as clearly those guests are saying something that resonates with an audience. I think it is critically important to understand why some 'antisocial' idea is resonating, especially if it is harmful.
Rogan is also great at hearing out a guest, finding common ground, and then discussing differences. Something I try to continually improve upon myself.
I'm in no way advocating some kind of 'equal time' type argument for all sides of an issue, but I think it is important that we address ideas that have a significant number of proponents rather than ignore them. Remember that both the women's rights and civil right's movements were initially considered antisocial and selfish.
> Somehow considering or even listening to a different idea has become viewed
as weakness and something to be avoided.
Important distinction: This is not about weakness and avoiding harm to the
self. It's about caring for and preventing harm to the society we live in.
Relevantly, framing things with a language of personal weakness (both "this thing I want you to stop doing is weakness" and also "this thing I want you to start doing is not
weakness") is a common indoctrination tactic for manipulating people. IMO, you should worry about its relation to how you said what you
just said and where the idea came from.
When those "different ideas" are flat out lies, malice, greed, and anti-science peddling, then
it is something to be _prevented_ not avoided. Because we've learned from
centuries of directly observing how regular people respond to them even when
those people are strong and capable. Ignoring everything we know
from historians about human behavior causes real problems over and over again,
so it's probably best not to.
> I personally do not consider all 'sides' of an issue to be equal, and am
capable of considering an argument without normalizing it.
Even if this is true, history has shown repeatedly that it's not a sound model for preserving civic wellness.
> I think it is critically important to understand why some 'antisocial' idea
is resonating, especially if it is harmful.
We already understand why. Indoctrination works. That case was solved a very
very long time ago and there is literally no mystery left. Giving malicious
indoctrinators a credible and far reaching platform where the respected host jovially
nods along always proves to further their agenda no matter how much we wish
it weren't the case. On the other side, we have evidence and research on deplatforming now, and we see that it works.
> Remember that both the women's rights and civil right's movements were
initially considered antisocial and selfish.
You should be aware that this subtly invokes any number of informal fallacies:
equivocation, relativist fallacy, false equivalence, questionable cause, texas
sharpshooter, probably others (that is the problem with the informal ones).
A person who says that women and black people should not have equal rights is
the opposite of a pro-social narrator. Trying to represent it as otherwise is
bad news.
Interesting stance, I still generally disagree with it as not everyone agrees on what is and isn't indoctrination. It's very easy for unconscious biases to slip in when deciding what is and isn't allowed.
I very much favor the platforms that allow an open exchange of ideas and allow participants to make up their own mind. I've generally learned much more from those that disagree with me than those that agree.
> I very much favor the platforms that allow...participants to make up their own mind
That's a pleasant idea, but it blatantly ignores the fact proven time and again throughout all of recorded history that all people are easily manipulated and that mass brainwashing is real. People have been writing treatises on this for literally thousands of years.
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)
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.
> 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.
It's baffling how a group of random people can assert so much pressure. Millions consume Joe's podcast, but somehow a dozen(?) of anonymous people inside Spotify believe they know what is good for everybody.
These aren't just random people, so the number involved is irrelevant. The fact that Spotify has an exclusivity deal with him means that they inherently hold a powerful position over him. And they certainly don't care about what's good for everybody, that's not their prerogative. They care about what's good for Spotify, or moreso, what Spotify thinks is good for Spotify.
This is not the first time nor will it be the last time that a large corporation acquires some degree of power over something and wants to smooth it out for PR reasons. It has been going on since the dawn of corporate media.
Not sure you're correct that these employees have Spotify's best interest in mind. It's just as likely that they have their own political and social agenda which they are able to leverage by working at Spotify.
That's a really strange assertion to make. A corporation the size of Spotify giving that much leeway to individual employees on a major business relationship like this is basically unheard of and fairly implausible, and these sorts of things have been going on in a calculated, intentional manner for over a century in various forms of publishing.
This is the same kind of behavior that arises in those who scream "Fascist!", as they put their boot on your face and punish you for not doing exactly what they want you to do. It's all for power.
Overall, I'm glad to see this sort of public laundry-airing, even if the anonymous people are wrong. Anything that forces the public to review and consider how these massive content distributors make decisions about how they operate is a small win over the black-box algorithmic attention mining mess we have now.
This is what happens when you spend millions of dollars on the new, edgy thing, but forget that you might one day be held liable when that edge cuts someone.
I meant "new" in the "Spotify just figured out they should get into the podcast game, so they swallowed a bunch of podcast networks" sense and "edgy" in the "some of the guests on his show are promoting snake oil and bad decisions" sense.
Why do so many tech employees feel that they're entitled to be arbiters of morality? Tech companies should have the backbone to fire every annoying internal activist group that tries to sabotage their efforts.
Because your work is owned by Spotify and they can do what they want with it. Yes, it's well within your rights to form one of these internal activist groups that attempts to sway company policy by loud-mouthing your employer, but it's also well within the company's right to fire you. I simply wish tech companies had the courage to do so.
It is owned by spotify when I do the work. Don't listen to your workers and watch as everything goes to heck at the extreme or at the least you don't do as well and competition eats away at you.
When you are a 100% tech company then you better listen to your tech workers.
First off this isn't a tech issue, if you sign a 100 million deal with someone that usually comes with strings attached. The political side of it aside, Rogan can't seriously believe he can say whatever he wants and damage Spotify's brand in the process. If he wanted full autonomy, pretty easy, don't sign that deal.
Secondly on the political issues, at the very least his enabling of Alex Jones is irresponsible. He's giving a complete lunatic who does nothing but spread conspiracy theories an uncritical platform. This isn't even a matter of ordinary politics any more, platforming someone who calls the victims of a school shooting crisis actors is reprehensible. Not really sure how anyone who has some sense of morality wants to enable that. I fully understand tech workers who want to put a stop to it rather than enabling it for financial gain.
This is honestly the first time in my life where basic decency, honesty and factuality are politicised.
The article makes it clear that this is a group that does not have leadership backing. I very much doubt this internal group of staffers is attempting to push back against leadership due to business concerns. This is definitely political.
Also, the article explicitly mentions that this is a breach of contract, so there's very little chance this actually happens. Just more political noise from the same type of people that always generate political noise.
This is why you should only use podcast clients that are just rss feed consumers. Any aggrigate, algorithm curated feed will just try to manipulate you.
I'm not a fan of these podcasts, just remember who you're listening to (and that it's a group of people, not just the person who's voice you hear.)
Sure to get downvoted into oblivion for this, but Spotify has a responsibility to provide direct editorial oversight over Rogan's podcast.
This isn't just him flirting with the alt-right and intellectual darkweb anymore. He's out here repeating lies about left-wing activists starting fires at the same time there are actual right-wing militias setting up paramilitary checkpoints.
This has gone from Joe saying stupid stuff to Joe spewing dangerous rhetoric that may get people killed.
62 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadI hope total control is hardcoded explicitly in his contract...
Not all missing episodes feature particularly controversial guests, depending on one’s personal sensitivities.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
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.
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.
I believe we are already inundated with media sources that amplify a single worldview and that is extremely harmful. Somehow considering or even listening to a different idea has become viewed as weakness and something to be avoided.
Rogan is one of the few that has an audience of people with widely varying preferences. He also does not give every fringe/extreme idea or person equal time. Instead he has guests on that are already noteworthy and have an audience. I find some of those episodes the most interesting as clearly those guests are saying something that resonates with an audience. I think it is critically important to understand why some 'antisocial' idea is resonating, especially if it is harmful.
Rogan is also great at hearing out a guest, finding common ground, and then discussing differences. Something I try to continually improve upon myself.
I'm in no way advocating some kind of 'equal time' type argument for all sides of an issue, but I think it is important that we address ideas that have a significant number of proponents rather than ignore them. Remember that both the women's rights and civil right's movements were initially considered antisocial and selfish.
Important distinction: This is not about weakness and avoiding harm to the self. It's about caring for and preventing harm to the society we live in.
Relevantly, framing things with a language of personal weakness (both "this thing I want you to stop doing is weakness" and also "this thing I want you to start doing is not weakness") is a common indoctrination tactic for manipulating people. IMO, you should worry about its relation to how you said what you just said and where the idea came from.
When those "different ideas" are flat out lies, malice, greed, and anti-science peddling, then it is something to be _prevented_ not avoided. Because we've learned from centuries of directly observing how regular people respond to them even when those people are strong and capable. Ignoring everything we know from historians about human behavior causes real problems over and over again, so it's probably best not to.
> I personally do not consider all 'sides' of an issue to be equal, and am capable of considering an argument without normalizing it.
Even if this is true, history has shown repeatedly that it's not a sound model for preserving civic wellness.
> I think it is critically important to understand why some 'antisocial' idea is resonating, especially if it is harmful.
We already understand why. Indoctrination works. That case was solved a very very long time ago and there is literally no mystery left. Giving malicious indoctrinators a credible and far reaching platform where the respected host jovially nods along always proves to further their agenda no matter how much we wish it weren't the case. On the other side, we have evidence and research on deplatforming now, and we see that it works.
> Remember that both the women's rights and civil right's movements were initially considered antisocial and selfish.
You should be aware that this subtly invokes any number of informal fallacies: equivocation, relativist fallacy, false equivalence, questionable cause, texas sharpshooter, probably others (that is the problem with the informal ones).
A person who says that women and black people should not have equal rights is the opposite of a pro-social narrator. Trying to represent it as otherwise is bad news.
I very much favor the platforms that allow an open exchange of ideas and allow participants to make up their own mind. I've generally learned much more from those that disagree with me than those that agree.
That's a pleasant idea, but it blatantly ignores the fact proven time and again throughout all of recorded history that all people are easily manipulated and that mass brainwashing is real. People have been writing treatises on this for literally thousands of years.
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.
How does one distinguish a pseudo-intellectual from a real intellectual?
> 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...
You've just described mainstream media nowadays.
Do you have any credible examples?
This is not the first time nor will it be the last time that a large corporation acquires some degree of power over something and wants to smooth it out for PR reasons. It has been going on since the dawn of corporate media.
Secondly on the political issues, at the very least his enabling of Alex Jones is irresponsible. He's giving a complete lunatic who does nothing but spread conspiracy theories an uncritical platform. This isn't even a matter of ordinary politics any more, platforming someone who calls the victims of a school shooting crisis actors is reprehensible. Not really sure how anyone who has some sense of morality wants to enable that. I fully understand tech workers who want to put a stop to it rather than enabling it for financial gain.
This is honestly the first time in my life where basic decency, honesty and factuality are politicised.
Also, the article explicitly mentions that this is a breach of contract, so there's very little chance this actually happens. Just more political noise from the same type of people that always generate political noise.
I'm not a fan of these podcasts, just remember who you're listening to (and that it's a group of people, not just the person who's voice you hear.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This isn't just him flirting with the alt-right and intellectual darkweb anymore. He's out here repeating lies about left-wing activists starting fires at the same time there are actual right-wing militias setting up paramilitary checkpoints.
This has gone from Joe saying stupid stuff to Joe spewing dangerous rhetoric that may get people killed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/16/oregon-fires... https://www.newsweek.com/half-million-people-evacuated-orego...