Thread by @mattsheffield

Thread: Joe Rogan and rise of pseudo-expertise 1/x

As you may have seen, @Spotify's new hire has been telling young adult listeners not to get a COVID vaccination.

No one should take medical advice from an MMA commentator, but the sad reality is that many people will...

It's an unfortunate human tendency to take advice from someone with a confident tone of speaking, regardless of their actual knowledge.

But that tendency is made worse by the rise of infotainment fandoms.

It doesn't really matter if you're obsessed w/a fictional franchise...

Being obsessed w/Star Wars, Marvel, Star Trek, LOTR, etc. doesn't really affect your life too much.

It's a lot more serious to become a superfan of actual people. That has real implications because, um, they're real people...

But we're all finite people. None of us knows everything about many subjects, let alone all of them. The risk to the superfan is that they don't know what their heroes don't know...

The COVID experience should have taught us that science is about continual revision and hypothesis.

Unfortunately, many people have come away w/the faulty idea that science is just a bunch of opinions. Joe Rogan seems to be one.

But reality is not subject to opinion. It's still there whether you believe in it or not.

The rise of "alternative facts" conservatism has created an epistemic crisis in our politics. Millions of people truly believe that cutting taxes increases revenues...

The "alternative facts" perspective isn't unique to politics, however. It's been very strongly embedded in our pop-culture as well, thanks to people like Norman Vincent Peale as @CRightcast has shown very well: rightcast.substack.com

It exists elsewhere with "The Secret," etc.

There are some people who believe that dumb or terrible opinions would be exposed in a neutral "marketplace of ideas," but this is not true. Just look at how many people still believe that human evolution isn't true. It's the majority opinion in some countries...

Dumb opinions said confidently by very famous people are also particularly noxious because they have much more force.

Joe Rogan is a good entertainer, but he really doesn't know much about anything besides TV, standup, and things related to MMA. His fans don't see it that way...

That's true of so many other media blatherers like Ben Shapiro, Tim Poole, Steven Crowder, Jordan Peterson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Alex Jones. They don't know what they're talking about but their fans are too ignorant to know it...

Our modern technology of search engines, spreadsheets, and video effects allows almost anyone to look like they know wtf they're talking about--but only if you know even less then they do. It's a simulacrum of knowledge. It looks real but it isn't...

The best thing to learn in life is that you don't know shit. Unfortunately, having other people's knowledge at our fingertips has made us think that we have it, too.

In summary: Joe Rogan doesn't know shit and @Spotify needs to make him say that to protect public health.

Thanks for reading the thread. Please share if you enjoyed it. I've made the argument into an essay form if you want to see that version here: flux.community/matthew-sheffi…

I could have saved myself the time and just posted this Far Side cartoon.

Gary Larson made this point much better than I did:

https://twitter.com/gpwigglesworth/status/1387397911512850435?s=20