Opinions, experts, and ignorance

I may have many faults, but one thing I try my damnedest not to do is to spout off on topics about which I am clearly ignorant.

That determination to limit my own pontificating to subjects upon which I have earned some right to pontificate is, unfortunately, not shared by a lot of people.  How many times have you heard someone say, "Well, I'm no expert, but...", followed by some ridiculous claim that appears to have been pulled directly from the person's nether orifice?

Well, if you're no expert, maybe a better strategy would be to keep your damn mouth shut.  Or, better still, to learn something about the topic at hand before you try to make a cogent statement about it.  If I know nothing about a subject, my opinions about it are very nearly worthless -- and personally, I don't have any need to pretend they aren't.

Sadly, "I have a right to my own opinion" seems, for a lot of people, to trump everything and everyone else, including people who have spent their entire lives studying the subject.

Which, unsurprisingly, brings us to Joe Rogan.

Rogan has turned this kind of thing into performance art.  He went to the University of Massachusetts for a while, but dropped out because he thought it was "pointless."  His two main accomplishments since then are fighting for (and later being a commentator for) the UFC, and being a stand-up comedian and podcaster.  His show The Joe Rogan Experience is one long litany of pride-in-ignorance.  He's an on-again, off-again antivaxxer, and was one of the principal distributors of misinformation during the first months of the COVID-19 epidemic.  He hates former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a passion, calling him "a fucking dictator" -- but in the next breath admitted he has "zero understanding of Canada's political system."  He called Israel's actions in Gaza "genocide," but ten days later had policy specialist Coleman Hughes as a guest, and when Hughes took Rogan to task about his assessment, Rogan shrugged it off with, "well, you know a lot more about it than I do."

Well, if you have "zero understanding" of something, maybe you shouldn't be talking about it on your radio show, mmmm?  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If you don't know, then that's where the conversation should stop."

The reason Rogan's name comes up is because (ignorance notwithstanding) he is still way near the front of the pack in media popularity, despite two instances just in the last couple of weeks demonstrating that he apparently spends his spare time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.

In the first, he went on a long, rambling diatribe about how the 1969 Moon landing was definitely faked.  Probably by director Stanley Kubrick, of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, because "That guy could fake it one hundred percent."

"People keep secrets," Rogan said.  "This idea that people can’t keep secrets because some people can’t keep secrets—high level military guys keep secrets all the fucking time.  They go to the grave with those secrets."

Oh, and there's no way astronauts could pass through the Van Allen radiation belts alive, he says.  "They never even flew a chicken through those fucking things and had it come back alive."

Well, at least he's right about that much.  NASA has sent exactly zero chickens into space.

So righty-o.  Back to reality.  We've known about the Van Allen belts since 1958, and sent probes up there repeatedly to measure radiation flux, and the astronomers (i.e. the people who actually know what the hell they're talking about) found that with proper shielding, both delicate technology and human beings could safely pass through them.  Me, I'm inclined to trust that over the rantings of a kickboxer-turned-podcaster.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait, there's more!"  Rogan also weighed in on cosmology last week -- because of course he did -- and said that in his opinion, Jesus makes more sense than the Big Bang:

People would be incredulous about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but yet they’re convinced that the entire universe was smaller than the head of a pin.  And for no reason than anybody’s adequately explained to me, that makes sense… instantaneously became everything.  Yeah.  Okay. I can’t buy that.  I’m sticking with Jesus on that one.  Like, Jesus makes more sense.

Now, I'm not going to get into the resurrection of Jesus -- Cf. my earlier comment about my not broadcasting my opinion in domains where I am manifestly unqualified -- but I do know a bit about cosmology, and what is clear from Rogan's statement is that he is apparently incapable even of comprehending the damn Wikipedia page on the Big Bang, wherein he (or anyone else) could have the topic "adequately explained" to them in five minutes or so.  

Or maybe he just can't be bothered.

Or both.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, Steven Crowder, February 2017]

But to return to my earlier point; why does anyone think this man's opinions, on topics where he himself demonstrates (and occasionally admits) complete ignorance, have any relevance?  If I were completely ignorant of geology, I might have the "opinion" that the interior of the Earth was filled with vanilla butter frosting with sprinkles, but that wouldn't affect the science at all -- it would just demonstrate that I was in no position to have my views taken seriously.

So why, why do people still listen to this guy?  Is it because his routine is mildly entertaining?  Is it because he might eventually say something correct, and the listeners are breathlessly waiting for that moment?

Or is it, heaven forfend, that people actually believe him?

I dunno.  It's probably not worth fighting someone who does what he does in the name of "entertainment."  But the news in the last few days has been pretty dismal, and this just kinda pushed me over the edge.

I so want to get back to a world where we trust experts.  Not blindly; experts can be mistaken just like anyone else (in fact, a recent discovery in physics seems to have invalidated some earlier research -- for which the researchers had won the Nobel Prize).  But the fact is that people who are trained in science, and spent their entire lives studying the field, are far less likely to be mistaken within their area of study than us laypersons.  Not only do they know the facts and understand the models, they get how evidence and data work -- and when a particular claim is supported and when it is not.  The current "don't trust the experts" thing, promulgated by loudmouths all the way up to and including Donald Trump, is deeply mystifying to me.

Anyhow, this is likely to earn me hate mail from people who love Joe Rogan.  I'm okay with that.  If you think everything he says makes sense, or that his claims should somehow be on the same plane as actual scientists, you and I don't have much common ground anyhow.  

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