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Comment by axg11 | Hacker News Reader

> Joe ask the "dumb questions." The questions you would ask if you as a laymen were sitting in front of a Nobel Prize winning scientist

This is exactly why he’s so popular. Most people are laymen. Joe doesn’t have a research team coming up with optimal talking points. He’s a regular minded guy asking regular questions. He achieves depth through the sheer length of interviews.

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Joe is playing the same role as the youngest child at the Seder. It's a popular format because it serves a genuine human need. If no one asks the most basic questions, no one gets the most basic answers.

Well sure, but if the youngest child is primarily querying the schizophrenic uncle and taking his answers with complete credulity, then pawning them off on millions of other credulous people, it’s reasonable to feel that there’s a serious downside to such an act.

will someone think of the credulous people.

Doing so is essentially a hallmark of a society. Laws against fraud, for example, are among the oldest in existence, despite fraud overwhelmingly targeting the most credulous among us (for obvious reasons). This is a good thing, actually.

> Doing so is essentially a hallmark of a society.

would this imply something is not right with our society because there aren't laws against listening to joe rogan.

Nope! It implies that yes, someone should think of the credulous people.

I don’t believe censoring Rogan is justified/wise/useful/etc. — even if it were it’d still be illegal anyway. But does that mean I think we should just throw credulous folks to the wolves with snarky remarks like “won’t someone think of the credulous people?!”

We should think of the credulous people, and take society’s threats against them and their threat to society seriously.

Maybe the schizophrenic uncle is telling us the earth is not at the centre of the universe, should we censor him?

Humanity has proven to be so wrong about so many things before, best let the discussion flow instead of trying to kill competing theories...

I didn’t suggest killing competing theories. Only pointing out that this analogy is missing some fairly important characteristics. You know, the ones people are actually worried about.

If "out of my butt" is the best support you have for your "theory", then it's not really a theory is it?

Any of us could write an app that generated "theories" ... a few may even turn out to be correct or close.

I am pretty confident that the appropriate place to distribute revolutionary new scientific models based in factual evidence isn't the joe rogan experience.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better one.

Research shouldn’t be locked up behind paywalls and in ivory towers. It should be public knowledge and lots of basic questions should be asked about it.

Sure. And a growing portion of research is made available through places like arxiv. The government is also pushing new regulations to make research publicly available when funded by the government, which is a dominant force in grant funding. This is wildly different than presenting findings on JRE.

And, in general, revolutionary new scientific ideas are targeted at scientists rather than the lay public. Ideas like new models of the solar system don't tend to take hold because the public thinks they are cool but instead because they become inevitable within the scientific community. Being less able to go on JRE and talk about how awesome ivermectin to a massive listener base is isn't going to limit scientific breakthroughs in the future.

This is a straw man. There is a spectrum of choices between having Alex Jones on multiple times and treating him seriously and censoring him.

The thing about asking the schizophrenic uncle about things is that it becomes clear they're schizophrenic, even if the child asking is buying it all.

A while ago I read that lots of people were upset with Joe Rogan for having Alex Jones on his show. I really didn't know anything about Jones other than what you see on cable news and Rogan I'm fairly neutral on. So I found an Alex Jones episode and played it. Jones came off as being entirely unhinged. It was not flattering at all. They were basically winding Jones up and then letting him explode.

They also fact checked EVERYTHING Jones said. They would interrupt the conversation and fact check him real time which I really liked.

And almost all the fact checks came back and Jones was right. They kept doing it after an hour of this stuff.

The Alex Jones episodes are well known for being the wildest comedy ever aired on JRE.

I think he sees himself a lot in the tradition of Stern and Opie and Anthony, where some outrageous stuff is cool. He doesn’t see himself as a media outlet but a guy who wants to have fun and push weird shit. Obviously it’s caused him trouble with the anti vacc guys he had and he’s sort of normalised his show a bit, but still I think he sees himself in that tradition. He’s not looking to be Dan Rather.

IMO I think this is the root of both the valid defense and the valid critique of Rogan. He doesn’t seem to properly account for the fact that having the # of followers he has is itself a signal of credibility. It’s very hard to overcome that with offhanded “I’m a normal guy don’t listen to me!” remarks. I don’t feel he properly informs his users of just how fringe some of his guests are, and in fact once they’re on his show they’re actually not fringe (in the social proof sense of fringiness).

I understand your point and partially agree with it - I do think Rogan has learnt something from the vacc debacle. I’m just trying to explain from what I think is his POV on the matter.

> having the # of followers he has is itself a signal of credibility

Is it though? I assumed it meant people found his show entertaining.

Of course it signals credibility. I suppose you can argue that the entire effect of social proof doesn’t exist, but I’m sure there are better uses of that groundbreaking knowledge than commenting on HN!

Social proof is one of those heuristics that should be taught in school so people would learn to discard. In fact multiple pieces of cognitive bias should really be taught in school…

So then why don't you do everything Joe Rogan says? You should be powerless before his tremendous social proof. This is the kind of "I'm special smart, the other side are sheeple" discourse that is pointless.

If I found Rogan entertaining enough to listen to him frequently, it probably would affect my behavior. Instead, I have other people who I pay more attention to and whose social proof probably does unduly affect my decisions :) Lol I’m not the one here claiming to be immune to it!

Everybody is using heuristics to navigate an extremely complex world, most of the heuristics are pretty good (which is why they persist), but they also have corner cases.

It's not an "act". For better or worse, you're hearing the real Joe Rogan. He would have the same conversations with guests even if the microphones were switched off.

> Most people are laymen.

This statement is not even false. One is inevitably a layperson in most things, even at one's job (like Rogan is at interviewing interesting people), but also usually not layperson in at least some things.

So for any given topic… most people are laymen

Depends on what the topic is and who is in the audience? You can't be a layperson full stop you can be a layperson at something, it's not applicable without a topic

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