I agree that a debate between a scientist and politician is silly and doesn't lead to a good faith discussion, and that the "come and defend your position" argument is disingenuous in that context.
From what I can see though, Hotez is advocating political positions and using "science" as a cover. Even if he has experience in the scientific part of it, if he wants to get into the politics, he needs to engage with it, he can't just hide and say "science!".
Regardless, the debate would be stupid. The issue is not the science, it's the government overreach. It would be stupid to hear RFK debate the effectiveness of vaccines, and stupid to hear Hotez pontificate about why forced vaccination or lockdowns are ok. I'd personally rather see a debate about the politics between two qualified people that doesn't sink to invoking "science" as relevant.
The problem is that the science became political when certain portions started advocating for things that weren't backed by science and had no fundamental groundwork of support. The six-foot rule literally came out of thin air.
Not really though, the 6-foot rule was based on probability of transmission at various distances for airborne/droplet viruses. Perhaps it's too conservative, but all of this is probability-based. It's mostly been validated as we did studies and metastudies throughout the pandemic -- likely could have been reduced to 3 feet as we learned more but a "6-foot rule" tends to result in maybe 4 or 5 feet distances so the initial guidance seems okay:
I think it's more accurate to say it came out of air slightly thickened by a virus that nobody really understood.
All of us are sitting back three years later pontificating on how science overstepped its boundaries, politics used it as a club, and/or screwballs rose to prominence with (sometimes) baseless conspiracy theories[1]. Here in 2023 we're acting like people engaged in these acts mainly with negative intent. I think rather we were a society that was a afraid and didn't know what to do.
We made a ton of mistakes and a bunch of silly decisions. A lot of them killed people. Some of them might have changed an election. Many of them also saved lives.
[1] Like the lab leak theory. To me that concept has legs.
>> All of us are sitting back three years later pontificating on how science overstepped its boundaries, politics used it as a club, and/or screwballs rose to prominence with (sometimes) baseless conspiracy theories[1]. Here in 2023 we're acting like people engaged in these acts mainly with negative intent. I think rather we were a society that was a afraid and didn't know what to do.
"Science" wasted a lot of its credibility by allowing itself to be "used as a club" to imbue certain policy positions with unwarranted confidence. In hindsight, that was a pretty bad mistake. Now people literally use "I believe in science" to state allegiance to certain political positions, which is not good.
Yes, and I would go further and say that most anything said about COVID in the public sphere is going to be far more a political statement than a scientific one.
Even something like "vaccines work" is far more a political statement than a scientific statement.
The domain of each relevant science is narrow. And so many areas of science are relevant to any person wanting to understand enough to know how personally to change their behavior in the face of a pandemic.
An epidemiologist can say some very specific scientifically proved things. A virologist will say some others. A psychology researcher will say another. An education researcher, another - and so on. And then within these disciplines there will be various disagreements.
Go further and science isn't enough. There are moral and ethical questions involved, such as how to balance hurting children and the poor to protect the elderly, etc.
The idea that the public should "follow the science" is patently absurd as it has no meaning other than "follow my suggestions".
The thing that Rogan/Musk/etc don't seem to realize is that scientists have debates literally every day, it's just that we do it in print, very slowly. There's just no way you could possibly sit around and think about what the data presented mean in real time.
Rogan and Musk could write a scientific paper expressing their beliefs- even funding scientists to carry out experiments possibly supporting their positions. I think it would be quite interesting to see a Rogan, Musk, et al paper.
Yep. I think it would expose just how weak his thinking is, if he were to write a scientific paper (even an opinion paper).
But musk doesn't play in the science publication sphere. To him, that sphere is basically just a corrupt system for perpetuating power structures and it's easier for him to talk shit on twitter,.
This is probably true on a micro level but not on a macro level. There are probably a lot of things worth debating in the world of climate science, but the number of people who are allowed to even ask questions, is tiny. Basically, the only people with clearance to debate climate science are climate scientists, which is, all things considered, a pretty small marketplace.
Moreover, scientists debating amongst themselves is one thing for chemistry and quite another for Psychology or Anthropology or Public Health - fields that borrow credibility from the self-evident power of the scientific method to do history or philosophy or policy making.
> the only people with clearance to debate climate science are climate scientists, which is, all things considered, a pretty small marketplace.
Like most highly specialized fields, getting 100% current on the state of the art will likely take full immersion in the field and years of dedicated study. You just don't get a lot of people who spend years doing the work of becoming a PhD and don't actually, you know, get their PhD. I'm sure they exist but they're understandably going to be super rare compared to jokers who read a couple papers (if that) and decide they know "the truth".
A PhD, like all degrees, is just a piece of paper. This piece of paper doesn't mean you'll say true things or do good science, it's just a shortcut way of letting people know "I've spent a lot of time on this."
As for who know best, I'm always skeptical of whoever is less curious, and that usually depends more on the person than the education level.
So it's impossible or pointless to convince/communicate ideas without two subject matter experts involved?
And we're supposed to trust politicians, policy makers, Youtube/Reddit moderators, etc to be able to decipher this stuff when enforcing their interpretations? Just "trust the science"?
I think their point was that you absolutely should not trust politicians, policy makers, Youtube/Reddit moderators, etc. They're the ones using phrases like "trust the science". Fauci is a scientist but he's also a a part of the government and maybe even had something to hide. The stupid things he said on a highly public stage shouldn't be taken with the same level of consideration as things said in long-form scientific discussions. If he used that phrase in one of those, he'd have been immediately called out. The fact he was willing to use that phrase so often should bring into question how rigorous his long-form scientific discussions actually were, but those discussions are done the way they are because it helps minimize people saying stupid, emotionally driven, things and/or distracting from the truth everyone in the conversation is supposed to be seeking.
Rogan seems to actively listen when he has people on. A discussion format is what he would like to do. Nothing seems out of sort for this.
He could be completely wrong on something and invite someone with conflicting views and give them a platform for hours. He doesn't trample all over them in the moment like so many others.
I would make the distinction that he is perhaps bad at science, rather than anti-science. He just wants to discuss it, which is the format he prefers to work in.
As for a debate not showing the truth, I'll agree. However, I'll also say that there has been a lot of confindence lost in some authority figures who stated things as fact when they should have been using weaker statements like, "we believe" or "we don't know, but do this just in case". Sure, it could be said it was politicians making these statements, but they were buttressed by fame seeking scientists. (on the topic of covid)
The government and their scientists never admit they were wrong, everything is always stated as fact. Best example of the this is the food pyramid. They just roll out a new one and pretend the previous one never existed.
I don't know where we stand right now with regard to either the food pyramid or covid, except to get the new boosters as they come out on the latter.
That's the point. In print you can cite your sources. Meanwhile, in verbal debates you can make up whatever you like and things happen to fast for anything to be verified. A study in Berkeley where they followed university-level debate-teams in 1996 by Liebowitz and Gagne[1] found that about 63% of the verifiable "facts" used in this format were inaccurate, generally trivially so but nobody noticed.
Likewise, it's easier to deceive somebody in verbal formats than in print. Canadian pollster Frank Graves of Ekos Research tracks misinformation with a "misinformation index" where he polls people about provably false statements. People who primarily consume audio or video news, rather than reading it, across all political lines, reliably score lower on this "misinformation index".[2]
[1][2] I'm making this stuff up and if this was a verbal debate you probably wouldn't know that, whereas in this format you can trivially Google these things. Graves does write about Misinformation Index but has not done anything about print vs audio.
Hotez doesn't do that. He has a long track record of saying things, on video, that contradict prior things he's said, also on video. The reason he won't debate anyone is that he'd immediately be hung by his own words.
Is that honestly your strongest evidence? I'll save everyone the time, it's nothing spliced in with a bunch of super annoying unrelated clips, sound effects, and visual clutter.
Debates are contests of speaking ability and skill in convincing. It's possible and expected for a skilled debater to win with a proposition that's clearly untrue. Debates are just absolutely the wrong tool for truth-discovery.
Not against gish-galloping. This is not a "scientific" dispute where there's 95% agreement and they disagree on the 5%. This is homeopathy cures cancer vs an oncologist.
That's not what a debate is. A debate is a contrived conversation format where presenting evidence and countering the evidence of your opponent isn't really possible in real time.
It's fine if done in good faith. Debating somebody like Kennedy is a losing proposition. He will bury you with a ton of nonsense that "feels right". Refuting every point takes way more time than you have in a debate.
Productive scientific debating is usually done in writing, or over long periods of time, not in entertainment-driven TV shows. It's unfortunate both are called "debating" but mean something very different.
For example, most journals will specifically select peer reviewers who have published papers with conclusions/results counter to the one being reviewed. And those reviewers will take a run at you.
Journals do this because printing papers that need a retraction isn't in their best interest. If they can, they'll shoot down a paper before it gets that far.
Sure - but do they engage in scientific debates with non-experts? There just isn't any value with that. Imagine someone like Paul Graham "Debating" RFK on whether Wifi causes "the blood brain barrier to open and allow toxins in" -- the level of misunderstanding you'd have to correct and education you would have to provide just to get them to a point to understand how WiFi works and how non-ionizing radiation propagates is just massive. The base of their understanding is the essence of "Not even wrong".
Being on Joe Rogan's show has nothing to do with a scientific debate. The host and the platform prevent meaningful and deep communication. That requires writing a book or at least a paper.
An online "debate" on youtube is just a ton of shocking oversimplification, if not dishonest misleading stuff.
It's also bad for accurate science. Unless you have a team of researchers that can feed 100% accurate data talking points to you in real time, someone is going to make a "mistaken" claim at some point that could lead the debate to an entirely inaccurate direction.
Improv and theater training would be better than scientific understanding in this arena, so why is one group trying to pretend it isn't?
Debates can also be structured enough that if the debaters follow the rules it becomes possible to see clear winners, or at least surface important ideas for people to chew on. The James Baldwin / William Buckley debate is a good example[1]. Somehow though I don't think you'd get that kind of structure in a Joe Rogan podcast.
(See we can all make "pithy" one word comment in order to undermine attacks on our stance, but it's not really like, useful. I think this comment is actually cowardly as you seem to either be baiting someone else into counter-attacking what they perceive to be your stance and thus allowing yourself a chance to refute their assumptions prior to making your own claim, OR you're actually just afraid of wading into an actual debate and you're just throwing out a nothing virtue-signal. Either way, HN generally expects better)
Give me a break. If what Robert F Kennedy said about the history of vaccines was wrong, someone can and should be able to refute it on the podcast in a conversation.
The reality is, the things he said in the first hour of his episode were factual:
Older vaccines with mercury WERE dangerous. Pharma/government WERE complicit in hiding and misrepresenting (and even lying) about said dangers. Vaccine manufacturers ARE federally protected against any and all civil action against them, yet there products are essentially mandatory for around 72 million children a year.
There is a history that is worth discussing and examining here, even if society refuses to discuss the present for fear of being labeled "anti-vax". Vaccines can be a societally good thing, and corporations can also be profiteering machines. Two things can be relatively true at once.
>In spite of the scientific consensus that fears about its safety are unsubstantiated,[6][7][8][9] its use as a vaccine preservative has been called into question by anti-vaccination groups. A statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Public Health Service in 1999 prompted the removal of thimerosal from many vaccines[1][10] It remains in use as a preservative for annual flu vaccines.[11]
>Concerns based on extrapolations from methylmercury caused thiomersal to be removed from U.S. childhood vaccines, starting in 1999. Later it was reported that ethylmercury is eliminated from the body and the brain significantly faster than methylmercury, so the late-1990s risk assessments turned out to be overly conservative.[23]
Also, the reason (some) vaccine makers get immunity (from some claims against them) is because the products are priced in the 1-10USD range, but the liabilities were in the 1-10 Mil-USD. No one could get liability insurance, so suppliers were exiting the market. So now the federal government (who also license the whole process and approve the vaccines) accept liability for faults not caused by improper handling etc.
I read the wiki page you linked and I came out with more questions. If you read the toxicology section it says pretty plainly that it's extremely toxic, moves freely about the body, distributes to all body tissue, crosses the blood-brain barrier, stays in the brain for (probably) two weeks, and "The mechanisms of toxic action are unknown." It says that the link to autism has been debunked, that's fine, and yet it's use in vaccines has been mostly stopped in the US, and completely banned in Europe.
I'm just even more convinced I don't want it in my body.
Of course, everything is toxic in sufficient dose. So is 50 micrograms (a) toxic, (b) more toxic than the alternative and (c) more harmful than not being vaccinated.
The answer to all three questions is no. There is no evidence it is at all toxic. We use it specifically because alternatives ARE known to be harmful and not being vaccinated is thousands of times more dangerous.
All of this is well established by the science. But again you are "convinced" not by any science but because it sounds bad and someone once told you mercury is bad. I don't get this at all, why not just do the research and spend 10 minutes grappling with a little complexity? I am no chemist, but it's pretty straight forwards: it has been tested, it has been used for decades, it is safe. The minute there is evidence otherwise, I am all ears. But just noping out honestly baffles me...
if there's no evidence of it being harmful, why has it's use mostly been stopped? Why did the UNEP consider banning it, specifically to reduce mercury exposure? Why do they label it with a skull and crossbones?
I don't really care if it's the least toxic of the possible alternatives, it's still toxic and shouldn't be ingested in any way.
They imply, without directly stating, that because it's cleared from the human brain (they believe but don't know for sure, they tested on monkeys but not humans of course) faster than it's sibling compound, Methylmercury, that it's simply safe to ingest. However, it also states that ethylmercury breaks down into inorganic mercury, which is both toxic, and has a half-life of AT LEAST 120 days. So you end up with inorganic mercury in your brain and it may stay there for years.
The wiki page literally states in plain English that health organizations have considered banning it, but it would just cost too much damn money. That's not science, that's something else.
You keep acting like I'm some kinda of science denier but I'm literally reading the wiki page YOU linked, and it says it's extremely toxic, in multiple ways. If anyone is sticking there head in the sand, it's you.
"Acute or chronic mercury exposure can cause adverse effects during any period of development. Mercury is a highly toxic element; there is no known safe level of exposure."
You're so confident that "there's no evidence" it's bad for you, and you're just plain wrong. You accuse me of simply receiving my opinions/beliefs with no evidence and it's looking more and more that it's the other way around. Looking forward to more condescending yet horribly wrong and uninformed responses from you.
Wow how rapidly you went from "read this" to "I'm not going to respond and just downvote everyone that disagrees with me"
Edit: Oh ya another great part of this wiki page is when it states, "The United Nations Environment Program backed away from an earlier proposal of putting thiomersal on the list of banned vaccine compounds as part of its campaign to reduce mercury exposure.[18] It stated that eliminating it in multi-dose vaccines, primarily used in developing countries, would lead to high cost and a refrigeration requirement that developing countries could ill afford."
So they were considering banning it to reduce mercury exposure, which we know is bad for us, but they didn't because.... drumroll please.... money. Shocking. The fears are completely unfounded though.
This wiki article is super weaselly and just plain gross. The first paragraph states that "In spite of the scientific consensus that fears about its safety are unsubstantiated,[6][7][8][9]..."
If you actually check those sources they're all about specifically autism. But the paragraph says nothing about autism and simply states that fears about it's safety are unsubstantiated. Later on it goes into detail about how toxic it is and that it's mechanism of toxicity is not known. Basically it's very toxic, it will damage your brain and your kidneys, but don't worry about it because it for sure doesn't cause autism. It later breaks down into inorganic mercury which is also toxic.
It also says, "Later it was reported that ethylmercury is eliminated from the body and the brain significantly faster than methylmercury, so the late-1990s risk assessments turned out to be overly conservative."
I'm not a doctor, but I think I'll shoot for 0 toxic mercury in my brain, regardless of it's rate of removal relative to other extremely toxic substances, thank you very much.
I suspect if I told you that I have a substance that is significantly less lethal than cyanide, you still wouldn't take it. I sure wouldn't.
It also kinda implies that multiple governments have banned it's use, mostly just to shut up those crazy anti-vaxxers, which is just ridiculous.
Edit: Downvotes without replies are always so impressive.
A question I pose to myself whenever someone posits something that's literally true (ie, "vaccines can cause harmful side effects) but leads them to a different conclusion than myself (ie "therefor nobody should get the jab") is "What problem are you solving for?"
Vaccine mandates involve a ton of sub-decisions. Are we trying to protect the most vulnerable or the most valuable citizens? Are we willing to infringe on other rights in the name of public safety? Who are we trying to financially burden and benefit with this decision?
People will always prioritize things differently than you, and "not wanting to help the opposition make a case to undermine my work" is a pretty reasonable stance to take if your goal is to advance your work. It doesn't matter if there is merit to their point if your goal is not "find all the information and use that to help inform a decision".
RFK is a loon who's only claim to fame is his last name. All those statements could be true and none of them would be meaningful. We know broadly what benefit generally administered vaccines provide and we can quickly learn the cost of stopping them.
A young man was recently paralyzed by polio in NYC. Polio! Because he wasn't vaccinated! Because his community does not believe in vaccination! Imagine being paralyzed by a disease effectively eradicated in the 1960s.
While you're imagining things, imagine having your life ruined by addiction and hearing the people responsible will not be HELD responsible because they're rich, from ruining people's lives.
Or imagine getting cancer from a product that was fraudulently tested by the company that makes it and then being told to "trust the science" regarding a product from the same damn company. Only a "loon" wouldn't trust these people, for sure.
You can find danger in anything, eventually you grow up and learn it's necessary to balance risk vs reward. Let's ban cars outright, I have factual proof someone died in a car accident today!
Who said to ban cars or vaccines? I said this topic can and should be discussible without devolving into hysterics and weird conclusions like yours, and the corporate impunity of pharmaceutical agencies is worth examining.
If they're ignorant then Hotez should be able to destroy them on air, with ease, shouldn't he?
The actual fear here is not that these guys are ignorant idiots but rather that they will in fact make many correct points that aren't easy to refute at all, and that Hotez - a completely discredited person who has said many untrue things - would end up losing the debate comprehensively. Which is why he has now backpedalled. It should be an easy $100k+ win for a charity of his choice but he can't do it.
3) Never, ever trust unless you're the one paying them
It is a trial lawyer. They do not follow the rules as you know them. They play to win. They're one step above mercenaries or pirates. Their entire job is to be convincing without necessarily being right. That's what they're paid to do.
There are a lot more lawyers than that guy in politics though. I don't get what the fuss is about.
Proper politicians believe lots of untenable things too. The difference is that they won't usually be confronted on it, if they are the journalist will be blacklisted as someone who clearly wants the other team to win.
That is, if they're open about it at all. You can bet a lot of mainstream politicians, and maybe even more policemen, spies and government officials, believe in staring-at-goats level stuff. They just don't believe in the necessity or desirability of convincing the public of any of it.
I expect that in the unlikely event RFK Jr. wins, maybe if Biden is unable to continue and they can't unify around anyone else - then RFK Jr. will quietly stop talking about fringe stuff like this, and the press will dutifully not bring it up anymore. He's from a political dynasty, he'll do the transfer to mainstream candidate just fine.
As an aside, I know a number of Democrats who will vote for a Republican before they’ll vote for a Kennedy. Nothing against Kennedys, just not a fan of your principal claim to fame being your last name.
It's so tempting to give a trite "now you're asking the real questions" type answer, but I think it is possible if you become familiar with the kinds of rhetoric debaters use and evaluate how that lines up with the known facts of an issue. It is cognitively taxing to do, and for what it's worth I'm not great at it.
Well, it's not perfect, but it's probably the best we have.
The adversarial trial format process assumes (hopes) that:
1. Both sides have competent lawyers that are doing the same thing
2. The judge prevents lawyers from going outside the rules
3. The jury is competent and is putting forth an honest effort
4. If misconduct is discovered after the fact there are avenues to a retrial (appeal, etc)
We can look at many times where this system went horribly wrong. However I think it's fairly close to the best that can be hoped for. When all parties are competent and well-intentioned (not always the case, sadly) it is probably one of the strongest links in the legal system.
I agree it’s probably the best we have for the legal system where disagreements need to be settled at scale. I think it is not the best for deciding on a small number of very important questions, like “Who should be the president?” or “Is climate change real?”
I would argue that #4 is where this fails most dramatically. Once you have been convicted of a crime, none of the "innocent until proven guilty" protections apply any more.
You have very little recourse, even if you possess overwhelming evidence of misconduct. Appeals are, at best, very slow, and there is a good chance that you will be spending that time in jail -- during which time it is hard to prepare for your defense.
And there is practically no penalty for a prosecutor who engages in misconduct. They hold immunity stronger even that that of police. There is effectively zero constraint on them to be honest. Many do it anyway -- they are not, for the post part, monsters. But if you encounter one who is, your rights were effectively forfeit the minute you walked in the door.
Once I learned about that (as a technique) it completely changed how I present ideas and greatly increased the number of people who were influenced by them.
I also realized that logic is greatly overrated in debate because almost nothing covered in debates is ruled by logic, IE if you're trying to debate a policy for homeless people, logic contributes nothing.
I was a civil trial lawyer for 45+ years (retired now). I couldn't disagree with your statement more.
1. In 99% of civil trials there was an opportunity for both lawyers to settle, but they decided their client would do better at trial. In every one of those trials, one of the lawyers was horribly wrong. That's the life of every trial lawyer.
2. The job of a trial lawyer is not "to be convincing without necessarily being right." The job of a trial lawyer is knowing which cases to try and which cases to settle.
3. Top trial lawyers know in advance when they have a winning case and when they have a losing case. And they don't try a losing case. They settle. Because the bottom line is: you try a losing case against me? I promise you the outcome. You are going to lose. Nobody tries a losing case against a top trial lawyer and wins.
After I got my feet wet with several hundred non-jury small claims property damage cases, I then tried just under 75 jury trials and chancery cases. There is only one case that I lost (interesting story for another day). Not because I was Perry Mason. But because I was very good at knowing which cases to try and which to settle.
Literally all RFK Jr. has to do is throw endless nonsense against the wall, doesn’t have to be consistent with itself, doesn’t have to come from real sources, and just trip up the PhD on one single issue. Then he can spike the football and claim victory. It’s an impossible setup.
Refute all 30 of these, NOW, and if you can’t then clearly you don’t know anything and RFK Jr. wins.
When you’re done we got 30 more and basically an endless supply. Doesn’t matter if you prove 99 of them wrong. If you can’t prove one wrong during a live debate we claim victory. We don’t care if you show that our arguments are inconsistent with each other, and totally impugn one of our sources. We still expect you to refute endless nonsense from that same source. Because we’re debating in bad faith.
You don’t ever get to grill JFK Jr., because he’s not the scientist, you are. It’s not a debate it’s an interrogation.
Joe Rogan berated a primatologist for telling him that no, there is not a race of 6’ tall chimps who walk upright and sleep on the ground. These are not serious people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__CvmS6uw7E
You just described how right-wing "debate" works. There's a reason the most popular examples are Ben Shapiro going to a college campus and using rhetorical tricks to dunk on students who are prepared for an honest discussion, not intellectual subterfuge.
This is also why Shapiro has cultivated the fine art of speaking in such a rapid-fire, grating tone. He wants listening carefully to him to be as uncomfortable as possible.
Literally all RFK Jr. has to do is throw endless
nonsense against the wall
refute all 30 of these, NOW, and if you can’t then
clearly you don’t know anything and RFK Jr. wins.
It's the reason why we can't have rational public debate and why dreams of "unfettered free speech" leading to an "enlightened marketplace of ideas" don't tend to pan out in reality.
Speaking a falsehood is vastly easier than disproving a falsehood.
And for any nontrivial topic, the uninformed public will not be qualified to discern which side is telling the truth.
> Literally all RFK Jr. has to do is throw endless nonsense against the wall, doesn’t have to be consistent with itself, doesn’t have to come from real sources, and just trip up the PhD on one single issue. Then he can spike the football and claim victory. It’s an impossible setup.
These are classic approaches to demagoguery, commonly known as the Gish Gallop & Brandolini's Law
This is something you couldn't previously discuss (flagged as misinformation on platforms). Rogan was shunned for discussing it and now it's becoming acceptable.
Jon Stewart didn't get shunned for talking about it at the time. One might think it's just because he's lefty, but that's only partially true. It's specifically because he wasn't also giggling at the phrase like Kung-Flu, or attempting to give medical advice to anyone for anything, or entertaining countless conspiracy theories.
He was also able to question mandates, and big pharma, and Fauci, and Biden because he has as a huge history of arguing in good-faith and doing proper interviews. Joe has a history of smoking weed, looking stonedily at his guests like they just made the most mind-blowing convincing arguments he's ever heard, no matter what they just said, then babbling endlessly without adding anything new to the discussion.
I think you've missed the point, and I've been downvoted for venturing to make it, nevertheless let's try the same point in a different light: ideas that were first widely broadcast (ie, before Jon Stewart) by perhaps a dangerous, irreverent, clown which were previously considered disinformation have now been accepted, at least in op-eds, by not only the WSJ ("wrong team") but now the "paper of record", the NYT ("correct team").
What happened is that both political parties in the US have become steadily more hostile towards China. As a consequence, the lab leak conspiracy theory has become much more politically and socially acceptable in the US, and is being expounded upon in major media outlets.
This is despite the fact that the theory has virtually no support in the scientific community, as every piece of evidence we have points ever more strongly to the initial outbreak having occurred in the Huanan market, where we now know wild animals that can carry SARS-CoV-2 were being sold. This is, by the way, exactly the same way that the original SARS outbreak occurred in 2002-2003. It's almost 100% identical.
The new update confirms that the US intelligence community has no evidence of a lab leak.
The most prominent lab leak supporters are so upset with the lack of evidence in the new release that they are now accusing the US government of being part of the cover-up. To quote the most prominent lab leak theorist, Alina Chan:
> It's getting very difficult to believe that the government is not trying to hide what they know about #OriginOfCovid when you see a report like this that contains none of the requested info.
The other leading conspiracy theorists, like Richard Ebright, are echoing Alina Chan. So now, the conspiracy theory involves the Chinese government, the US government, and most of the world community of virologists.
All of this is based on no evidence, and each time evidence fails to materialize, the lab leak theorists argue that this just proves that more people are involved in the conspiracy.
Since I was a child, I have never been a fan of the debate format for determining truth. There’s a reason it’s a competitive pursuit in high school and college where people can excel regardless of which position they’re defending. It’s because debates don’t prove who’s right, they prove who’s better at debating.
Debates aren't really about determining the truth. Or, for that matter, about winning.
Debates are ideally ways to expose ideas, where they work and where they break, so that the audience can make better decisions. Debates are about the audience.
100%. For COVID and other topics there is an unfortunately common mindset of "the public isn't smart enough to sort out truth and make up their own mind" which is patently incorrect and dangerous, really, because the people that tend to espouse this are either the experts that want to be deferred to or people willing to defer to experts out of fear or laziness or inability to contend with ambiguity.
Bill Ackmann: "I was, however, mistaken in encouraging a debate between @RobertKennedyJr and @PeterHotez as based on my further research Hotez does not appear to be a credible advocate for vaccine policy in light of the repeated inaccuracies of his public statements during the crisis and potential conflicts he may have.
...
We can find better experts than Hotez who can help advance the discussion and address any of RFK’s potentially mistaken claims or reasoning.
And it should be a discussion rather than a debate. The goal should not be to determine who won or lost, but rather to advance knowledge and understanding.
Let’s not censor, dismiss, or run from responding to those who challenge authority, conventional wisdom or even our current scientific understanding, as doing so only serves to destroy confidence in our system, our government and our nation."
For all those criticizing the debate format as unsuitable for truth discovery, I would remind them that no form of information is immune from manipulation. Recall the highly cited The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.
1. There is still no direct Ancestor. Despite extensive sampling and analysis of wildlife, no direct ancestor or intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2 has been found. The closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 is RaTG13, found in bats, but the two viruses are still genetically distinct.
2. The furin cleavage site, which allows the virus to efficiently infect human cells, is not found in most close relatives of SARS-CoV-2. Some virologists mentioned this was a sign of lab manipulation as early as 2021. Natural origin needs to show a jump path.
3. Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were detected, is over 1,000 kilometers away from the region where the closest bat coronaviruses were found. The market where the first cluster of cases was identified did not sell bats.
> Despite extensive sampling and analysis of wildlife
There has not been extensive sampling of wildlife, nor of farmed wild animals. It seems that China closed down wild animal farms across the country very quickly after it discovered the outbreak, and there are no published studies of these farms that I'm aware of.
> The closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 is RaTG13
RaTG13 is no longer the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2. A closer virus, BANAL-52, has since been discovered by a French team in Laos. It turns out that if you start looking, you start finding wild viruses that are closer to SARS-CoV-2 than anything previously known. This in itself already disproves any lab-engineering scenario, unless you start invoking actual cloak-and-dagger conspiracies (e.g., between the French researchers who discovered BANAL-52 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology).
> The furin cleavage site, which allows the virus to efficiently infect human cells, is not found in most close relatives of SARS-CoV-2.
Furin cleavage sites are not rare in coronaviruses, and it's known that they can develop (e.g., through recombination with coronaviruses that have them). There's basically zero chance that the specific furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 could have been inserted by researchers, because it's caused by an out-of-frame insertion.
> Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were detected, is over 1,000 kilometers away from the region where the closest bat coronaviruses were found. The market where the first cluster of cases was identified did not sell bats.
Change the word "Wuhan" to "Guangzhou," and you've just perfectly described the origin of the original SARS outbreak in 2002. Guangzhou is also 1000 km from where the bats live, and the virus wasn't brought to Guangzhou by bats. It was brought there by the wild animal trade (in fact, the same sorts of animals were sold in the Wuhan market as in the Guangzhou markets). The Wuhan market outbreak is a carbon copy of the original SARS outbreak.
> Hotez appeared [italics mine] to offer a conversation with Rogan as an alternative to a debate with RFK. Jetelina thought it was a good alternative. “More of an educational kind of approach, question and answer,” she said, “may be helpful for a large audience like that.” With a Q&A, the focus is more on learning and less on winning.
Is Hotez actually willing to go on by himself?
People equating Joe Rogan to Jerry Springer probably never listened to him. He gives the guest time to talk (maybe more time than they really need) and doesn't reach for a soundbite.
By the way, I got the sample of RFK's book about Fauci, and couldn't get past the first chapter. He definitely writes like a nutcase.
While I do greatly prefer the long-form discussion shows over the short edited segments on network tv, what I'd really love to see become popular, in general, but especially in politics, is super-long-form, unedited discussion in text, like a days-long email thread style. Everyone gets time to express their points and counterpoints as clearly as possible with fewer emotional overtones.
It's far too easy for bad-faith actors to pummel good-faith actors with charisma, bullying, gottchas, etc. that are hard to recover from on the spot even if you have a better chunk of time than you'd get in a drive-by argument.
These two people could do this right now and easily publish anywhere, then Joe could discuss it on his show if he wanted to bring attention to it and even bring them on to discuss the discussion live. But I'm willing to bet one of them would never agree to that format. Or they'd agree and derail the conversation completely as soon it started to become clear they're convincingly getting called out.
If you're going to fight the supposed massive tidal wave of "misinformation", you'd think that scientists or advocates for scientists would be champing at the bit to debate someone like RFK, even if RFK is coming into it with bad faith arguments.
Vox misses the point entirely by saying there's a proper place, time, etc. for engagement when it comes to serious issues if the goal is to limit or slow the spread of misinformation.
Does the writer think the people watching/listening to Joe Rogan actively seek out these structured engagements that they suggest? The people consuming JRE to watch RFK talk about vaccines obviously don't care about them. They're boring and don't accomplish anything in changing opinions of anybody who's already entrenched in their views and won't even consider watching/attending the engagements anyways.
Regardless of the money for charity that's being put up as an incentive, and regardless of who they'd be countering in a debate - I think it's foolish for Hotez to decline or not suggest someone else who might be interested in debating.
It's mind-boggling how scientists and journalists put themselves on some sort of intellectual pedestal and believe that debating with "crazy people" won't help the public sphere and it's somehow above them. Of course it would help.
If you even convince ONE person that maybe the 5G radio waves aren't messing with the blood-brain barrier allowing whatever they believe to happen, you've succeeded.
Exactly! One shouldn't question the Big Pharma ever. Those companies do what they do for love. Our job is pressuring the government to pay whatever it takes to get vaccines and stuff, made with love.
Refusing a good faith debate with an audience of millions of people is silly. Insisting that a good faith debate has to be done in real time is silly. The only salvation for this rotten society is a return to literacy.
Because it still doesn't provide enough time to verify or refute any claims being made, especially when one sides strategy is to make a barrage of claims to trip up the other for as long as possible. If most people saw the use of that tactic as a clear sign of weak arguments and question dodging, it wouldn't be such a silly thing because it would server to expose that. But it turns out that kind of thing is a form of entertainment for many people and they like to watch their guy "win" against the other. That's a problem on both sides, but objectively a far more dangerous problem with the topics the right decides to utilize the tactic with.
Debate moves science along, but it's debate between people with many years (or even decades) of scientific training. This debate mainly occurs in print, and is based on rigorous analysis of data. The "spectators" are also experts, and basically everyone involved agrees that the debate will be adjudicated by the data in the end.
The kind of debate that would occur on Joe Rogan's podcast would be very different. First of all, one of the participants would have no scientific training at all. Second, it would basically come down to who could score the better rhetorical points in the moment, in the eyes of a lay audience. This sort of debate has nothing to do with how science advances.
There's huge value in explaining scientific knowledge to the public, so that it's not some complete mystery to them, particularly when it directly affects their lives. However, that's very different from hosting a "debate" between a scientist and an anti-vaxxer. This reminds me of the "teach the controversy" mantra that creationists in the US were heavily pushing a decade or two ago. The argument there was that children should be presented with evolution and creationism on equal footing, and should then decide for themselves which they find more convincing.
People want questions they have answered instead of ignored. It's like a tone deaf corporation ignoring customer complaints while speaking platitudes about how much they care and how right they are.
113 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadFrom what I can see though, Hotez is advocating political positions and using "science" as a cover. Even if he has experience in the scientific part of it, if he wants to get into the politics, he needs to engage with it, he can't just hide and say "science!".
Regardless, the debate would be stupid. The issue is not the science, it's the government overreach. It would be stupid to hear RFK debate the effectiveness of vaccines, and stupid to hear Hotez pontificate about why forced vaccination or lockdowns are ok. I'd personally rather see a debate about the politics between two qualified people that doesn't sink to invoking "science" as relevant.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
All of us are sitting back three years later pontificating on how science overstepped its boundaries, politics used it as a club, and/or screwballs rose to prominence with (sometimes) baseless conspiracy theories[1]. Here in 2023 we're acting like people engaged in these acts mainly with negative intent. I think rather we were a society that was a afraid and didn't know what to do.
We made a ton of mistakes and a bunch of silly decisions. A lot of them killed people. Some of them might have changed an election. Many of them also saved lives.
[1] Like the lab leak theory. To me that concept has legs.
"Science" wasted a lot of its credibility by allowing itself to be "used as a club" to imbue certain policy positions with unwarranted confidence. In hindsight, that was a pretty bad mistake. Now people literally use "I believe in science" to state allegiance to certain political positions, which is not good.
Even something like "vaccines work" is far more a political statement than a scientific statement.
The domain of each relevant science is narrow. And so many areas of science are relevant to any person wanting to understand enough to know how personally to change their behavior in the face of a pandemic.
An epidemiologist can say some very specific scientifically proved things. A virologist will say some others. A psychology researcher will say another. An education researcher, another - and so on. And then within these disciplines there will be various disagreements.
Go further and science isn't enough. There are moral and ethical questions involved, such as how to balance hurting children and the poor to protect the elderly, etc.
The idea that the public should "follow the science" is patently absurd as it has no meaning other than "follow my suggestions".
This Elon Musk?
But musk doesn't play in the science publication sphere. To him, that sphere is basically just a corrupt system for perpetuating power structures and it's easier for him to talk shit on twitter,.
Moreover, scientists debating amongst themselves is one thing for chemistry and quite another for Psychology or Anthropology or Public Health - fields that borrow credibility from the self-evident power of the scientific method to do history or philosophy or policy making.
Like most highly specialized fields, getting 100% current on the state of the art will likely take full immersion in the field and years of dedicated study. You just don't get a lot of people who spend years doing the work of becoming a PhD and don't actually, you know, get their PhD. I'm sure they exist but they're understandably going to be super rare compared to jokers who read a couple papers (if that) and decide they know "the truth".
As for who know best, I'm always skeptical of whoever is less curious, and that usually depends more on the person than the education level.
And we're supposed to trust politicians, policy makers, Youtube/Reddit moderators, etc to be able to decipher this stuff when enforcing their interpretations? Just "trust the science"?
He could be completely wrong on something and invite someone with conflicting views and give them a platform for hours. He doesn't trample all over them in the moment like so many others.
I would make the distinction that he is perhaps bad at science, rather than anti-science. He just wants to discuss it, which is the format he prefers to work in.
As for a debate not showing the truth, I'll agree. However, I'll also say that there has been a lot of confindence lost in some authority figures who stated things as fact when they should have been using weaker statements like, "we believe" or "we don't know, but do this just in case". Sure, it could be said it was politicians making these statements, but they were buttressed by fame seeking scientists. (on the topic of covid)
The government and their scientists never admit they were wrong, everything is always stated as fact. Best example of the this is the food pyramid. They just roll out a new one and pretend the previous one never existed.
I don't know where we stand right now with regard to either the food pyramid or covid, except to get the new boosters as they come out on the latter.
Likewise, it's easier to deceive somebody in verbal formats than in print. Canadian pollster Frank Graves of Ekos Research tracks misinformation with a "misinformation index" where he polls people about provably false statements. People who primarily consume audio or video news, rather than reading it, across all political lines, reliably score lower on this "misinformation index".[2]
[1][2] I'm making this stuff up and if this was a verbal debate you probably wouldn't know that, whereas in this format you can trivially Google these things. Graves does write about Misinformation Index but has not done anything about print vs audio.
Here's a video showing Hotez in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj6-QDVYbv8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_collaboration
For example, most journals will specifically select peer reviewers who have published papers with conclusions/results counter to the one being reviewed. And those reviewers will take a run at you.
Journals do this because printing papers that need a retraction isn't in their best interest. If they can, they'll shoot down a paper before it gets that far.
An online "debate" on youtube is just a ton of shocking oversimplification, if not dishonest misleading stuff.
Improv and theater training would be better than scientific understanding in this arena, so why is one group trying to pretend it isn't?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ
(See we can all make "pithy" one word comment in order to undermine attacks on our stance, but it's not really like, useful. I think this comment is actually cowardly as you seem to either be baiting someone else into counter-attacking what they perceive to be your stance and thus allowing yourself a chance to refute their assumptions prior to making your own claim, OR you're actually just afraid of wading into an actual debate and you're just throwing out a nothing virtue-signal. Either way, HN generally expects better)
The reality is, the things he said in the first hour of his episode were factual:
Older vaccines with mercury WERE dangerous. Pharma/government WERE complicit in hiding and misrepresenting (and even lying) about said dangers. Vaccine manufacturers ARE federally protected against any and all civil action against them, yet there products are essentially mandatory for around 72 million children a year.
There is a history that is worth discussing and examining here, even if society refuses to discuss the present for fear of being labeled "anti-vax". Vaccines can be a societally good thing, and corporations can also be profiteering machines. Two things can be relatively true at once.
>Concerns based on extrapolations from methylmercury caused thiomersal to be removed from U.S. childhood vaccines, starting in 1999. Later it was reported that ethylmercury is eliminated from the body and the brain significantly faster than methylmercury, so the late-1990s risk assessments turned out to be overly conservative.[23]
So the older vaccines were never dangerous...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal
Edit:
Also, the reason (some) vaccine makers get immunity (from some claims against them) is because the products are priced in the 1-10USD range, but the liabilities were in the 1-10 Mil-USD. No one could get liability insurance, so suppliers were exiting the market. So now the federal government (who also license the whole process and approve the vaccines) accept liability for faults not caused by improper handling etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...
I'm just even more convinced I don't want it in my body.
The answer to all three questions is no. There is no evidence it is at all toxic. We use it specifically because alternatives ARE known to be harmful and not being vaccinated is thousands of times more dangerous.
All of this is well established by the science. But again you are "convinced" not by any science but because it sounds bad and someone once told you mercury is bad. I don't get this at all, why not just do the research and spend 10 minutes grappling with a little complexity? I am no chemist, but it's pretty straight forwards: it has been tested, it has been used for decades, it is safe. The minute there is evidence otherwise, I am all ears. But just noping out honestly baffles me...
I don't really care if it's the least toxic of the possible alternatives, it's still toxic and shouldn't be ingested in any way.
They imply, without directly stating, that because it's cleared from the human brain (they believe but don't know for sure, they tested on monkeys but not humans of course) faster than it's sibling compound, Methylmercury, that it's simply safe to ingest. However, it also states that ethylmercury breaks down into inorganic mercury, which is both toxic, and has a half-life of AT LEAST 120 days. So you end up with inorganic mercury in your brain and it may stay there for years.
The wiki page literally states in plain English that health organizations have considered banning it, but it would just cost too much damn money. That's not science, that's something else.
Edit: "...because it sounds bad and someone once told you mercury is bad." Mercury is bad for you and there's literally no question about it. Here's the first result from google: https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/epidemiology/epidemiology-fact-...
You keep acting like I'm some kinda of science denier but I'm literally reading the wiki page YOU linked, and it says it's extremely toxic, in multiple ways. If anyone is sticking there head in the sand, it's you.
Second edit: To address your confident statement of "NO" to your own questions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3096006/
"Acute or chronic mercury exposure can cause adverse effects during any period of development. Mercury is a highly toxic element; there is no known safe level of exposure." You're so confident that "there's no evidence" it's bad for you, and you're just plain wrong. You accuse me of simply receiving my opinions/beliefs with no evidence and it's looking more and more that it's the other way around. Looking forward to more condescending yet horribly wrong and uninformed responses from you.
Edit: Oh ya another great part of this wiki page is when it states, "The United Nations Environment Program backed away from an earlier proposal of putting thiomersal on the list of banned vaccine compounds as part of its campaign to reduce mercury exposure.[18] It stated that eliminating it in multi-dose vaccines, primarily used in developing countries, would lead to high cost and a refrigeration requirement that developing countries could ill afford."
So they were considering banning it to reduce mercury exposure, which we know is bad for us, but they didn't because.... drumroll please.... money. Shocking. The fears are completely unfounded though.
It also says, "Later it was reported that ethylmercury is eliminated from the body and the brain significantly faster than methylmercury, so the late-1990s risk assessments turned out to be overly conservative."
I'm not a doctor, but I think I'll shoot for 0 toxic mercury in my brain, regardless of it's rate of removal relative to other extremely toxic substances, thank you very much.
I suspect if I told you that I have a substance that is significantly less lethal than cyanide, you still wouldn't take it. I sure wouldn't.
It also kinda implies that multiple governments have banned it's use, mostly just to shut up those crazy anti-vaxxers, which is just ridiculous.
Edit: Downvotes without replies are always so impressive.
Vaccine mandates involve a ton of sub-decisions. Are we trying to protect the most vulnerable or the most valuable citizens? Are we willing to infringe on other rights in the name of public safety? Who are we trying to financially burden and benefit with this decision?
People will always prioritize things differently than you, and "not wanting to help the opposition make a case to undermine my work" is a pretty reasonable stance to take if your goal is to advance your work. It doesn't matter if there is merit to their point if your goal is not "find all the information and use that to help inform a decision".
A young man was recently paralyzed by polio in NYC. Polio! Because he wasn't vaccinated! Because his community does not believe in vaccination! Imagine being paralyzed by a disease effectively eradicated in the 1960s.
Or imagine getting cancer from a product that was fraudulently tested by the company that makes it and then being told to "trust the science" regarding a product from the same damn company. Only a "loon" wouldn't trust these people, for sure.
Their intention is to 100% shit on vaccines and make their audience fearful of them.
The actual fear here is not that these guys are ignorant idiots but rather that they will in fact make many correct points that aren't easy to refute at all, and that Hotez - a completely discredited person who has said many untrue things - would end up losing the debate comprehensively. Which is why he has now backpedalled. It should be an easy $100k+ win for a charity of his choice but he can't do it.
Also totally normal that politicians and radio personalities want to debate him and not fellow scientists.
1) Never debate
2) Never listen to
3) Never, ever trust unless you're the one paying them
It is a trial lawyer. They do not follow the rules as you know them. They play to win. They're one step above mercenaries or pirates. Their entire job is to be convincing without necessarily being right. That's what they're paid to do.
Proper politicians believe lots of untenable things too. The difference is that they won't usually be confronted on it, if they are the journalist will be blacklisted as someone who clearly wants the other team to win.
That is, if they're open about it at all. You can bet a lot of mainstream politicians, and maybe even more policemen, spies and government officials, believe in staring-at-goats level stuff. They just don't believe in the necessity or desirability of convincing the public of any of it.
I expect that in the unlikely event RFK Jr. wins, maybe if Biden is unable to continue and they can't unify around anyone else - then RFK Jr. will quietly stop talking about fringe stuff like this, and the press will dutifully not bring it up anymore. He's from a political dynasty, he'll do the transfer to mainstream candidate just fine.
The adversarial trial format process assumes (hopes) that:
1. Both sides have competent lawyers that are doing the same thing
2. The judge prevents lawyers from going outside the rules
3. The jury is competent and is putting forth an honest effort
4. If misconduct is discovered after the fact there are avenues to a retrial (appeal, etc)
We can look at many times where this system went horribly wrong. However I think it's fairly close to the best that can be hoped for. When all parties are competent and well-intentioned (not always the case, sadly) it is probably one of the strongest links in the legal system.
You have very little recourse, even if you possess overwhelming evidence of misconduct. Appeals are, at best, very slow, and there is a good chance that you will be spending that time in jail -- during which time it is hard to prepare for your defense.
And there is practically no penalty for a prosecutor who engages in misconduct. They hold immunity stronger even that that of police. There is effectively zero constraint on them to be honest. Many do it anyway -- they are not, for the post part, monsters. But if you encounter one who is, your rights were effectively forfeit the minute you walked in the door.
Once I learned about that (as a technique) it completely changed how I present ideas and greatly increased the number of people who were influenced by them. I also realized that logic is greatly overrated in debate because almost nothing covered in debates is ruled by logic, IE if you're trying to debate a policy for homeless people, logic contributes nothing.
1. In 99% of civil trials there was an opportunity for both lawyers to settle, but they decided their client would do better at trial. In every one of those trials, one of the lawyers was horribly wrong. That's the life of every trial lawyer.
2. The job of a trial lawyer is not "to be convincing without necessarily being right." The job of a trial lawyer is knowing which cases to try and which cases to settle.
3. Top trial lawyers know in advance when they have a winning case and when they have a losing case. And they don't try a losing case. They settle. Because the bottom line is: you try a losing case against me? I promise you the outcome. You are going to lose. Nobody tries a losing case against a top trial lawyer and wins.
After I got my feet wet with several hundred non-jury small claims property damage cases, I then tried just under 75 jury trials and chancery cases. There is only one case that I lost (interesting story for another day). Not because I was Perry Mason. But because I was very good at knowing which cases to try and which to settle.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/09/22/30-facts-you-need-to-kno...
Refute all 30 of these, NOW, and if you can’t then clearly you don’t know anything and RFK Jr. wins.
When you’re done we got 30 more and basically an endless supply. Doesn’t matter if you prove 99 of them wrong. If you can’t prove one wrong during a live debate we claim victory. We don’t care if you show that our arguments are inconsistent with each other, and totally impugn one of our sources. We still expect you to refute endless nonsense from that same source. Because we’re debating in bad faith.
You don’t ever get to grill JFK Jr., because he’s not the scientist, you are. It’s not a debate it’s an interrogation.
Joe Rogan berated a primatologist for telling him that no, there is not a race of 6’ tall chimps who walk upright and sleep on the ground. These are not serious people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__CvmS6uw7E
Literally all Rogan or RFKJR would have to do is play one of the video mashups on youtube that show Hotez repeatedly contradicting himself.
It's the reason why we can't have rational public debate and why dreams of "unfettered free speech" leading to an "enlightened marketplace of ideas" don't tend to pan out in reality.
Speaking a falsehood is vastly easier than disproving a falsehood.
And for any nontrivial topic, the uninformed public will not be qualified to discern which side is telling the truth.
These are classic approaches to demagoguery, commonly known as the Gish Gallop & Brandolini's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0B7ILBquRo
I salute Joe Rogan for keeping the conversation alive.
This is something you couldn't previously discuss (flagged as misinformation on platforms). Rogan was shunned for discussing it and now it's becoming acceptable.
He was also able to question mandates, and big pharma, and Fauci, and Biden because he has as a huge history of arguing in good-faith and doing proper interviews. Joe has a history of smoking weed, looking stonedily at his guests like they just made the most mind-blowing convincing arguments he's ever heard, no matter what they just said, then babbling endlessly without adding anything new to the discussion.
I still watch both shows.
What happened?
This is despite the fact that the theory has virtually no support in the scientific community, as every piece of evidence we have points ever more strongly to the initial outbreak having occurred in the Huanan market, where we now know wild animals that can carry SARS-CoV-2 were being sold. This is, by the way, exactly the same way that the original SARS outbreak occurred in 2002-2003. It's almost 100% identical.
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-...
Maybe if we shut down all discussion as a society we wouldn’t have to confront the uncomfortable.
The most prominent lab leak supporters are so upset with the lack of evidence in the new release that they are now accusing the US government of being part of the cover-up. To quote the most prominent lab leak theorist, Alina Chan:
> It's getting very difficult to believe that the government is not trying to hide what they know about #OriginOfCovid when you see a report like this that contains none of the requested info.
The other leading conspiracy theorists, like Richard Ebright, are echoing Alina Chan. So now, the conspiracy theory involves the Chinese government, the US government, and most of the world community of virologists.
All of this is based on no evidence, and each time evidence fails to materialize, the lab leak theorists argue that this just proves that more people are involved in the conspiracy.
Debates are ideally ways to expose ideas, where they work and where they break, so that the audience can make better decisions. Debates are about the audience.
...
We can find better experts than Hotez who can help advance the discussion and address any of RFK’s potentially mistaken claims or reasoning.
And it should be a discussion rather than a debate. The goal should not be to determine who won or lost, but rather to advance knowledge and understanding.
Let’s not censor, dismiss, or run from responding to those who challenge authority, conventional wisdom or even our current scientific understanding, as doing so only serves to destroy confidence in our system, our government and our nation."
(abridged quote)
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1670996561789157377
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
1. There is still no direct Ancestor. Despite extensive sampling and analysis of wildlife, no direct ancestor or intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2 has been found. The closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 is RaTG13, found in bats, but the two viruses are still genetically distinct.
2. The furin cleavage site, which allows the virus to efficiently infect human cells, is not found in most close relatives of SARS-CoV-2. Some virologists mentioned this was a sign of lab manipulation as early as 2021. Natural origin needs to show a jump path.
3. Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were detected, is over 1,000 kilometers away from the region where the closest bat coronaviruses were found. The market where the first cluster of cases was identified did not sell bats.
There has not been extensive sampling of wildlife, nor of farmed wild animals. It seems that China closed down wild animal farms across the country very quickly after it discovered the outbreak, and there are no published studies of these farms that I'm aware of.
> The closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 is RaTG13
RaTG13 is no longer the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2. A closer virus, BANAL-52, has since been discovered by a French team in Laos. It turns out that if you start looking, you start finding wild viruses that are closer to SARS-CoV-2 than anything previously known. This in itself already disproves any lab-engineering scenario, unless you start invoking actual cloak-and-dagger conspiracies (e.g., between the French researchers who discovered BANAL-52 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology).
> The furin cleavage site, which allows the virus to efficiently infect human cells, is not found in most close relatives of SARS-CoV-2.
Furin cleavage sites are not rare in coronaviruses, and it's known that they can develop (e.g., through recombination with coronaviruses that have them). There's basically zero chance that the specific furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 could have been inserted by researchers, because it's caused by an out-of-frame insertion.
> Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were detected, is over 1,000 kilometers away from the region where the closest bat coronaviruses were found. The market where the first cluster of cases was identified did not sell bats.
Change the word "Wuhan" to "Guangzhou," and you've just perfectly described the origin of the original SARS outbreak in 2002. Guangzhou is also 1000 km from where the bats live, and the virus wasn't brought to Guangzhou by bats. It was brought there by the wild animal trade (in fact, the same sorts of animals were sold in the Wuhan market as in the Guangzhou markets). The Wuhan market outbreak is a carbon copy of the original SARS outbreak.
Is Hotez actually willing to go on by himself?
People equating Joe Rogan to Jerry Springer probably never listened to him. He gives the guest time to talk (maybe more time than they really need) and doesn't reach for a soundbite.
By the way, I got the sample of RFK's book about Fauci, and couldn't get past the first chapter. He definitely writes like a nutcase.
He's been on before. He offered in a tweet to go on again, just not in a debate format.
It's far too easy for bad-faith actors to pummel good-faith actors with charisma, bullying, gottchas, etc. that are hard to recover from on the spot even if you have a better chunk of time than you'd get in a drive-by argument.
These two people could do this right now and easily publish anywhere, then Joe could discuss it on his show if he wanted to bring attention to it and even bring them on to discuss the discussion live. But I'm willing to bet one of them would never agree to that format. Or they'd agree and derail the conversation completely as soon it started to become clear they're convincingly getting called out.
Vox misses the point entirely by saying there's a proper place, time, etc. for engagement when it comes to serious issues if the goal is to limit or slow the spread of misinformation.
Does the writer think the people watching/listening to Joe Rogan actively seek out these structured engagements that they suggest? The people consuming JRE to watch RFK talk about vaccines obviously don't care about them. They're boring and don't accomplish anything in changing opinions of anybody who's already entrenched in their views and won't even consider watching/attending the engagements anyways.
Regardless of the money for charity that's being put up as an incentive, and regardless of who they'd be countering in a debate - I think it's foolish for Hotez to decline or not suggest someone else who might be interested in debating.
It's mind-boggling how scientists and journalists put themselves on some sort of intellectual pedestal and believe that debating with "crazy people" won't help the public sphere and it's somehow above them. Of course it would help.
If you even convince ONE person that maybe the 5G radio waves aren't messing with the blood-brain barrier allowing whatever they believe to happen, you've succeeded.
The solution is to have the structured engagement first, then go on JRE to discuss that discussion.
A live show has less risk of sections being edited. Why is it silly?
And a single talking head in the media telling us the science implies there is complete consensus about that issue.
These both seem problematic, but Karen "no both sides" Landman seems to only see her own side.
Debate is what moves science along. What about that, does the distinguished Vox author not understand??
Debate moves science along, but it's debate between people with many years (or even decades) of scientific training. This debate mainly occurs in print, and is based on rigorous analysis of data. The "spectators" are also experts, and basically everyone involved agrees that the debate will be adjudicated by the data in the end.
The kind of debate that would occur on Joe Rogan's podcast would be very different. First of all, one of the participants would have no scientific training at all. Second, it would basically come down to who could score the better rhetorical points in the moment, in the eyes of a lay audience. This sort of debate has nothing to do with how science advances.
There's huge value in explaining scientific knowledge to the public, so that it's not some complete mystery to them, particularly when it directly affects their lives. However, that's very different from hosting a "debate" between a scientist and an anti-vaxxer. This reminds me of the "teach the controversy" mantra that creationists in the US were heavily pushing a decade or two ago. The argument there was that children should be presented with evolution and creationism on equal footing, and should then decide for themselves which they find more convincing.