LogFAQs > #962788733

adjl posted...

Debating them on their turf, though, is a complete waste of time.

I can never agree with this, the way I see it is that it's the best show of genuine willingness to debate and not bleat on with deaf ears. When people lose willingness to be vulnerable and entertain ideas they disagree with, that's the death of any meaningful discussion.

adjl posted...

He's extending this invitation because he knows accepting the invitation would be an exercise in extreme, disingenuous frustration for the experts in question and because his audience wants to see the experts discredit themselves (in their eyes) by rejecting it.

I have never seen Joe act in this way so I have a hard time believing it. Sure he's an idiot, I don't think he's malicious.

adjl posted...

Even if the invitation is accepted, I can guarantee Rogan has lined up enough bad faith arguments that even if the scientist does spend the entire week painstakingly picking them apart by repeatedly explaining rudimentary science and showing the same incontrovertible evidence again and again, he'll still have enough left un-debunked (just bunked, I guess) that he'll claim victory and his followers will accept that (if they haven't already disregarded the explanations because they think using the same evidence to answer the same question worded differently means the scientist has run out of proof).

I don't think he'd be aware they're bad faith, nor that he'd claim a victory either. I haven't seen him ever on a show present himself as the actual opposition, only as a voice of whatever counterarguments he's heard (or has), so there's no victory to claim. He may not be convinced but he's allowed to not be convinced.

adjl posted...

You cannot teach those that are unwilling to learn

I wouldn't say this is true of Joe either. He's learned his stance in the first place, question is are you convincing enough to overrule what feels right to him. If he's convinced, since he's an influence on others, others will follow suit.

adjl posted...

I continue to try, on the off chance that I might manage to chip away at their ignorance enough to make a difference, but my main focus in doing that is making sure that their misinformation doesn't go unchallenged.

Convincing a sheep does nothing when they're in the flock with their shephard. If someone is surrounded by like-minded people and a higher authority says its true, you don't have credibility to them. Your degrees and learning alone doesn't have as much weight as social pressures.

kind9 posted...

We're talking about science deniers here and you're acting like they have something to add to science.

We're talking about research deniers i.e. people who don't feel convinced by the same information as us. As far as they're concerned, we're trying to spread insufficient data as facts and they feel they have deduced from other data they do trust that it can't be true. It's very easy to lie to people with stats, and with the amount of data spread about covid that was done in a disingenuous way to make people act appropriately, they have reason to be suspicious.

I'm of the opinion that when the whole "covid deaths aren't the same as deaths while having covid" thing happened, that immediately put anybody questioning the severity in to high alert around people who spread the covid death reports. This put well-established scientists in the firing line, and I haven't seen anybody trying to re-establish themselves by using hard data. I've seen lots of "I'm a doctor and I've read the data and you should be convinced because I am", but when doctors are being held responsible for "lying" to them, that credibility means nothing.

kind9 posted...

The only value in debating them is to allow them to demonstrate how insane they are. The back and forth you're talking about should be between scientists or science communicators and the general public. Science deniers can go bury their heads in the sand.

To them, that's like saying "Christianity should only be debated between priests and the public", which has the pretty glaring problem of priests being pretty invested in saying God is real.

When it comes to science communicators, I often see covid communicated like word of God from on high, there's no Bill Nye type breaking it down in a simple enough form that the general public can actually understand. We can understand a bright flame from magnesium by burning a strip of magnesium.

I haven't seen a simplified childrens science demonstration of covid that's so clearly apparent, and it's pretty difficult to do so. This is why it was so damning when the covid deaths thing was highlighted; facts couldn't be transmitted any more as faith in communications was harmed.