Hacker News Reader

Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

Be careful, because his podcast is a bit of an echo chamber.

The other day he set up a debate on nutrition where he covered the topic of heart disease, and he put a cardiologist (Dr. Khan) with 20 years of experience debating with an acupuncturist (Kris Kresser) on the causes of heart disease.

And he kept interrupting the doctor and taking the acupuncturist side on the most absurd claims.

He is also into things like moon landing conspiracies and all that good stuff that generate a lot of internet traffic, but I think in a bit of a hypocritical way as I'm pretty sure he doesn't really believe in any of that stuff and just talks about it for the clicks.

View on HN

Dr. Khan is not just a cardiologist, he's a vegan and my problem with him specifically and with veganism in general is that it's often ideological.

Chris Kresser is not an "acupuncturist". And this is a classic ad-hominen ;-)

Joe kept interrupting Khan because Khan was avoiding answering the asked questions.

And Chris kept mentioning the elephant in the room, which is that the randomized-controlled trials (the gold standard in nutrition) don't show a statistically significant link between heart disease and meat or saturated fat consumption and that's a fact, being also the subject of recent meta analysis, that used GRADE to reach the conclusion that there is no good evidence for the claim that meat causes cancer and that adults should probably continue their current meat consumption:

https://examine.com/nutrition/red-meat-is-good-for-you-now/

This isn't to say that meat or saturated fat is good or bad, but if listening to such a podcast causes anger at the people daring to question a "cardiologist with 20 years of experience", then maybe you should consider that you yourself have stepped in the land of ideology / religion and that's just not compatible with science or health for that matter.

It's his formal training, he is a licensed acupuncturist. The man has absolutely no business talking about heart disease, especially with an experienced cardiologist.

The problem of putting someone with acupuncture training debating a cardiologist is that, in the eyes of that huge audience, he presents those opinions as perfectly equivalent, alternative to each other and equally valid.

When in fact, one person has basically no idea of what he is talking about, but in the eyes of the public, and because they are put side by side, they are seen as equivalent when they are not.

Why not put him against a non-vegan cardiologist then? Someone at least with equivalent training.

From a scientific point of view, the only diet that as ever shown to stop the progression of heart disease is a whole-food plant-based diet.

Khan replied to the questions, not sure why you are saying he avoided anything. It's obvious that Joe took Kresser side during the debate.

What kind of tough questions did he ask Kresser compared to Khan?

> It's his formal training, he is a licensed acupuncturist. The man has absolutely no business talking about heart disease, especially with an experienced cardiologist.

This is an extremely closed minded view—not everyone with formal training is automatically an expert. This is the appeal to authority fallacy, and a poor one at that.

> From a scientific point of view, the only diet that as ever shown to stop the progression of heart disease is a whole-food plant-based diet.

This is not true either, and I find it ironic it’s stated authoritatively with no sources.

Not everyone with formal training is an expert, but its the minimum requirement. Literally no one without formal training can be an expert in such a complex topic as heart disease.

Why is Joe Rogan asking about heart disease to a licensed acupuncturist in a podcast with 60 million downloads a month? It's like asking for legal advice from a massage therapist.

If you had heart disease or someone in your family had it, would you ask an acupuncturist for advice?

For the sources:

"proved decades ago that heart disease could be reversed solely with diet and lifestyle change"

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/our-number-one-killer-can-b...

The video is a summary of the studies listed via the "Sources cited" button, that you find scrolling down after the video.

> Not everyone with formal training is an expert, but its the minimum requirement. Literally no one without formal training can be an expert in such a complex topic as heart disease.

I have no bone in this particular fight. I'm inclined to agree with you, most of the time, but it's clearly possible to be an expert in nearly anything without formal training:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

Lots of absolutes in this discussion, but reality is usually far more nuanced.

It depends, if looking for advise on how to use excel from someone, I don't think that they need to be certified or whatever.

For asking someone to do some web design or a logo, I don't think it's necessary either, but there is a limit somewhere.

Think about this way, if you yourself or someone in your family would have heart disease, would you take advice from an acupuncturist?

I bet you wouldn't. What are the odds that Kris Kresser without any formal training or experience managed to better understand the science behind such a complex topic like heart disease than full-time scientists and cardiologists?

Self-learning is great for a lot of things, but heart disease is likely not one of them.

How dare you question dietary proselytizing which is clearly masquerading as scientific fact.

FWIW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study YMMV

The recent meta-analysis got to the same conclusions as before (the link between meat and cancer), it's just that the interpretation of the authors was different.

They said that although a link exists, its not worth it for people to change their diet, which has triggered outrage on the scientific community.

One of the authors of the studies meta-analysed complained that he never saw such as misrepresentation of the data.

The author of the meta-analysis is someone with strong financial links to the meat industry, so thay study is suspect, to say the least.

When you open someone up after a heart attack, what do you find clogging their veins? It's cholesterol. What happens when you eat cholesterol? Your cholesterol serum goes up.

If Joe could have found a serious cardiologist that would claim that cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, he would have long invited him to the show.

But the best he could come up with is Kris Kresser, which kind of says it all.

> When you open someone up after a heart attack, what do you find clogging their veins? It's cholesterol. What happens when you eat cholesterol? Your cholesterol serum goes up.

That’s an incorrect oversimplification of the situation. Like most of what is being bandied about here.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...

The amount of cholesterol in the blood is largely produced by our own body depending on the mix of fat and carbs that we eat, and a smaller but still significative part comes from dietary cholesterol.

Most people eat more than just an egg a day in terms of cholesterol. They eat dairy, meat, eggs, and fish multiple times a day typically one or more of those at every single meal.

So dietary cholesterol does add up over the day, combined with a bad mix of processed carbs and fats it's a recipe for disaster.

Yes, you can eat one egg day and get away with it, but most people eat way more cholesterol than that every single day.

> his podcast is a bit of an echo chamber.

> The other day he set up a debate on nutrition where he covered the topic of heart disease, and he put a cardiologist (Dr. Khan) with 20 years of experience debating with an acupuncturist (Kris Kresser) on the causes of heart disease. And he kept interrupting the doctor and taking the acupuncturist side on the most absurd claims

I haven't listened that episode, or really many Joe Rogan podcasts at all. But isn't that kinda the opposite of an echo chamber? He had two guests on with opposing viewpoints, and gave both of them a fair shake, even when one of the guests had an minority (absurd) opinion?

An echo chamber is a place where the local acoustics make it difficult to speak clearly.

Medical science is able to speak with brilliant clarity hard-earned from centuries of experimentation on the topic of heart disease.

If I hear a discourse involving a cardiologist and a layperson, and it's not really made apparent who is the expert and who is not, then I call that an echo chamber.

That's not the conventional definition of a metaphorical echo chamber.

> an environment in which a person encounters only beliefs or opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered

Source: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/echo_chamber

He has said it time and again, that he is willing to sit down and have a reasonable conversation with anyone and everyone.

which is a silly position to take because putting quacks and experts into a room on topics that require domain knowledge and scientific expertise is counter-productive and gives a false impression that both opinions are equally valuable or justified.

In reality, the show is an excellent avenue to mainstream conspiracy theorists and people who want to sell their latest books or products or whatever, and the people who will listen to it will get a hugely distorted view of what the actual consensus on certain topics is.

This is the same sort of dynamic that recently cropped up around a certain youtube 'educator' who claimed to teach people ML and to have disrupted the cartel of higher education, only to turn out that he had plagiarized a lot of his content and that the education was actually of extremely low quality. The same mentality, gatekeepers are evil, listen to the pot-smoking show-host who brings you the real information that they don't want you to know, yada yada.

Having guests with opposing views doesn't make it less of an echo chamber when the host is totally biased towards one of the opposing viewpoints.

>I think in a bit of a hypocritical way as I'm pretty sure he doesn't really believe in any of that stuff and just talks about it for the clicks.

Or maybe he just finds it interesting? I find myself on paranormal sites from time to time even though I know it's 100% (or at least 99.9%) bullshit. It's still fun to read.

There are a couple of huge differences. You don't have financially anything to gain by that, and you are not influencing the opinions of a huge number of people in the process.

There is already so much scientific ignorance in the general public, there is so much misrepresentation of science already.

A ton of people actually believe thinks like the Earth is flat, Joe many times gives a voice to that type of quacks for clicks.

His podcast many times acts as a vehicle for spreading ignorance, other than that yes its entertaining and people should know better. But often they don't and that's the problem.

It's also quite educational and interesting when he has good guests on. I don't know why people have to judge the entire podcast based on his worst guests when there is simply no other mainstream outlet, or at least one as big as Rogan's, that has nearly as many interesting scientists, philosophers, journalists, etc. on. Yes he also has idiots on. So what? The point is the entire world steps through that studio and people blanket generalize the podcast away whenever he has someone they disagree with on, which is a sad stance to take in my opinion.

>He is also into things like moon landing conspiracies and all that good stuff that generate a lot of internet traffic, but I think in a bit of a hypocritical way as I'm pretty sure he doesn't really believe in any of that stuff and just talks about it for the clicks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmlmxamw_k

He used to believe that, and now he doesn't.

That was just an example among many. Anything from alien landings to Atlantis to god knows what is fair game to Rogan.

He will gladly give his huge platform to the most complete wacko as long as it makes a good story and gets him his clicks, spreading a ton of misinformation and reinforcing common ignorant beliefs in the process.

> That was just an example among many

Well, it wasn't really an example at all as he's petty open about how silly he was to believe it, but ok.

Rogan invites anyone on who he finds interesting. Yes, he has a proclivity to want to believe things that are a bit out there, but he challenges a lot of those "wackos" as well. He also brings on many field experts just to hear what they have to say.

I think you're wrong about Joe fishing for clicks. He's been doing this a long time now and his format hasn't really changes. He's not purporting to be an expert of any kind (hell, he doesn't even claim to be intelligent) and he's an intellectually open person.

His show is not a platform for guests who won't offend your sensibilities, and he has no obligation to censor for you. If you don't like what a guest is saying then great; make up your own mind. He's not trying to convince you.

He does have some shared responsibility for the accuracy of what gets said on his show and the guests that he invites.

When he invites a guest he gives them a platform, many people hear what some of those quacks have to say and take it at face value.

He should take more care in not spreading so much misinformation and ignorance to a gigantic audience, there is too much of that in the world already.

Why does he? He's not a journalist, he's a talking head. He'll challenge statements he can't get behind, but this is an opinion/entertainment show, and he's not throwing up slogans that read "fair and balanced" at every opportunity.

I don't fundamentally disagree with what you're saying, but with great power, comes great responsibility.

Journalist or not, he still has a responsibility to his audience.

It's a shared responsibility, between him and the guests and the people that listen and take it at face value that should know better.

He can very well balance better the entertainment aspect with the accuracy of the information, especially on topics that have an actual impact on people's lives like health-related topics.

> he still has a responsibility to his audience.

What? If people stop liking what he has to say, they'll stop listening to him. I don't know what your point is. Set up federal regulations on the Joe Rogan Podcast because you disagree with some things he says?

My point is that Rogan does have some sort of moral responsibility for not letting his platform be used so easily to massively disinform the public on non-scientific beliefs.

> he still has a responsibility to his audience.

What? If people stop liking what he has to say, they'll stop listening to him. What's your solution? Set up federal regulations on the Joe Rogan Podcast because you disagree with some things he says?

>>Be careful, because his podcast is a bit of an echo chamber.

Counterpoint:

Be brave about hearing stupid arguments. They are a whetting stone for your own thoughts.

It is not smart, courageous, healthy or prudent to prevent yourself from being exposed to bad ideas.

everyone has an expiration date. someone who wants to make the most of their time probably should not waste it on nonsense.

He's since disavowed the moon landing conspiracy theory beliefs. I agree he has a bunch of episodes that dabble in pseudoscience, though. At least there are a lot of episodes with actual scientists as well.

Any individual podcast definitely is. He will agree with a lot of the stuff the guest says and not really fight back much. Arguably he doesn't have the knowledge to anyways.

But as a whole, I do find that he has a very wide variety of guests which show all sorts of view point. Just don't take what you hear in any single podcast as absolute truth.

If this is the Chris Kresser you are referring to - https://chriskresser.com/ - he is a lot more than just an acupuncturist.

He does have a popular blog, but take a look - https://chriskresser.com/about/

Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac. - "M.S. L.Ac." means Master of Science, Licensed Acupuncturist. This is his formal training, all I'm saying is that he shouldn't be presented as an expert to Joe Rogan's audience in the topic he was interviewed on.

But have you tried DMT, bro?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com