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 good 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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The flood of nonsense

I'm going to say this straight up, in as unambiguous a fashion as I can manage:

Given the widespread availability of fact-checking websites, there is absolutely no excuse for passing along misinformation.

The topic comes up today because I recently ran into three claims online, which I present here in increasing order of ridiculousness, and in almost no cases were they accompanied by anyone saying, "But I don't think this is true."  I'm hoping that by highlighting these, I can accomplish two things -- putting a small dent in the number of people posting these claims on social media, and instilling at least a flicker of an intention to do better with what you choose to post in the future.

The first one I've mostly seen from my fellow Northeasterners, and has to do with a spider.  Here's the most common post I've seen about this:

This statement -- which is almost verbatim the headline used by a number of supposedly-reputable news sources -- is wildly misleading.  When you look into it, you find that the species in question is the joro spider (Trichonephila clavata), and while they are pretty big for a spider (the leg-span can be around ten centimeters), nothing else about them is dangerous.  They're native to China and Japan, where people live around them in apparent harmony; while they do have venom, like all spiders, it's of low toxicity.  They're actually rather docile and reluctant to bite, and if they do, it's no worse than a bee sting.

And, for fuck's sake, they can't fly.  Flying requires wings, and if you'll look closely at the above photograph, you will see they don't have any.  Their tiny young do what is called "ballooning" (again, something many spider species do), creating a few silk threads and then catching a breeze to travel to a new locale.  So while they're definitely an invasive exotic species, and ecologists are concerned about their potential for out-competing native spider species, they pose about as close to zero threat to humans as you could get.

So put away the goddamn flamethrowers.

The second claim has to do with the information you can get from the color of caps on your bottled water.  The idea here is that bottled water distributers have coded the caps -- blue caps are used for spring water, black caps for alkaline water, green caps for flavored water, and white caps for "processed water."

It's the last one that gave me a chuckle.  I damn sure hope the water you're drinking has been processed, and that Aquafina isn't just filling water bottles from the nearest river, screwing the caps on, and calling it good.  Apparently the impetus for the claim is that because consuming "highly-processed" food has been associated with some health issues, anything "processed" is bad for you, so you should avoid those bottles with white tops.

The whole thing, though, is complete nonsense.  There's no correlation between bottle top color and... anything.  All bottled water has been filtered and sterilized (and thus "processed").  And if you need a particular bottle top color to tell if you're drinking flavored water, there are some other issues you might want to address, preferably with your doctor.

The third, and most idiotic, of the claims I heard about from my friend, the wonderful writer Andrew Butters.  Like me, Andrew is a thoroughgoing science nerd, and frequently finds himself doing facepalms over some of the stupid stuff people fall for.  He sent me a link to a video by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about an actor named Terrence Howard, who recently wrote a book about his new model for physics that proves pretty much everything we'd thought is wrong.  The basis of his model -- I swear I am not making this up -- starts from the proposition that 1 x 1 is actually equal to 2.

So Howard clearly (1) failed third grade math class, and (2) apparently has been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  And his "theory" (it makes me cringe even to use the word) would have vanished into the great murky morass of claims by unqualified laypeople to revolutionize all of science if it hadn't been for Joe Rogan, who gave the guy a platform and treated him as if he was the next Einstein.

Hossenfelder's takedown of Howard (and Rogan) is brilliantly acerbic, and is well worth watching in its entirety.  One line, though, stands out: "Joe Rogan isn't stupid, but he thinks his audience is."  Rogan's take on things is that Howard's ideas haven't caught on in the scientific community because the scientists are acting as gatekeepers -- rejecting ideas out of hand if they come from someone who is not In The Club.  This, of course, is nonsense; they aren't ignoring Howard's book because he's not a scientist, they're ignoring it because his claims are ridiculous.  This is not scientists acting as unfair gatekeepers; they simply know what the hell they're talking about because they've spent their entire careers studying it.

I had decided not to address Howard's claims, feeling that Hossenfelder did a masterful enough job by herself of knocking him and Rogan down simultaneously, and that anything I could add would be superfluous.  And, of course, given that Hossenfelder is a physicist, she is vastly more qualified than I am to address the physics end of it.  But since Andrew sent me the link, I've now seen Howard's claims pop up three more times, always along with some commentary about the Mean Nasty Scientists refusing to listen to an outsider, and this is why we don't trust the scientists, see?

Which, of course, made me see red, and is why you're reading about it here.  There's no grand conspiracy amongst the scientific establishment to silence amateurs; as we've seen here at Skeptophilia more than once, dedicated amateurs have made significant contributions to science.  No scientist would refuse to look at a revolutionary idea if it had merit.  Terrence Howard might well have mental problems, and be more to be pitied than censured, but Joe Rogan needs to just shut the hell up.

And for the love of Gauss, that 1 x 1 = 1 can be derived in one step from one of the fundamental axioms of arithmetic.

So.  Anyhow.  I need to finish this up and go have a nice cup of tea and calm down.  But do me a favor, Gentle Readers.  If you see this kind of nonsense online, please please puhleeeez don't forward it.  If you feel comfortable doing so, tell the original poster "this is incorrect, and here's why."  And if you run into any odd claims online, do a two-minute fact check before you post them yourself.  Snopes and FactCheck.org remain two of the best places to find out if claims are true; there's no excuse for not using them.

Let's all do what we can to stem the tide of misinformation, before we all drown in it.

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The dangers of pseudoarchaeology

One of my ongoing peeves is that so many people put more faith in popular media claims than in what the scientists themselves are saying.

This can take many forms.  We have the straw-man approach, usually done with some agenda in mind, where someone will completely mischaracterize the science in order to convince people of a particular claim, and for some reason said people never think to find out what the scientists actually have to say on the matter.  (One example that especially sets my teeth on edge is the young-Earth creationists who say that the Big Bang model means "nothing exploded and created everything" and forthwith dismiss it as nonsense.)

An even more common form this takes is the current passion many people have for shows like Monster Quest and Ancient Aliens and Ghost Hunters, which aim to convince viewers that there is strong evidence for claims when there is actually little or none at all.  This kind of thing is remarkably hard to fight; when you have a charismatic figure who is trying to convince you that the Norse gods were actually superpowerful extraterrestrial visitors, and supporting that claim with evidence that is cherry-picked at best and entirely fabricated at worst, non-scientists can be suckered remarkably easily.

But "hard to fight" doesn't mean "give up," at least to archaeologist David Anderson of Radford University (Virginia).  Because he has absolutely had it with goofy claims that misrepresent the actual evidence, and is publicly calling out the people who do it.

Anderson's quest started in February, when a claim was made on The Joe Rogan Experience that a famous piece of Mayan art, from the sarcophagus of Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who died in 683 C.E., showed him ascending into the skies in a spaceship:

It's one of the favorite pieces of evidence from the "Ancient Aliens" crowd.  But the problem is, it's wrong -- not only from the standpoint that there almost certainly were no "Ancient Aliens."  They evidently never bothered to ask an actual expert in Mayan archaeology, because that's not even what the art is trying to depict. Anderson was infuriated enough that he responded to Rogan in a tweet: "Dear @joerogan… [the piece of Mayan art you mentioned] depicts [Pakal] falling into the underworld at the moment of his death."  The "rocket" beneath the king's body, Anderson explains, is a depiction of the underworld, and the rest of the "spaceship" is a "world tree" -- a common image in Mayan art, not to mention art from other cultures.

Rogan, to his credit, thanked Anderson for the correction, but some of his fans weren't so thrilled, and railed against Anderson as being a "mainstream archaeologist" (because that's bad, apparently) who was actively trying to suppress the truth about ancient aliens for some reason.  Anderson, for his part, is adamant that archaeologists and other scientists need to be better at calling out pseudoscience and the people who are promoting it.  He cites a study done at Chapman University (California) showing that 57% of Americans polled in 2018 believe in Atlantis (up from 40% in 2016) and 41% believe that aliens visited the Earth in antiquity and made contact with early human civilizations (up from 27%).

Anderson says, and I agree, that this is a serious problem, not only because of how high the raw numbers are, but because of the trend.  I know it's not really a scientist's job to make sure the public understands his/her research, but given the amount of bullshit out there (not to mention the general anti-science bent of the current administration), it's increasingly important.

You may wonder why I'm so passionate about this, and be thinking, "Okay, I see the problem with people doubting climate science, but what's the harm of people believing in ancient aliens?  It's harmless."  Which is true, up to a point.  But the problem is, once you've decided that evidence -- and the amount and quality thereof -- is no longer the sine qua non for support of a claim, you've gone onto some seriously thin ice.  Taking a leap into pseudoscience in one realm makes it all that much easier to jump into other unsupported craziness.  Consider, for example, the study that came out of the University of Queensland that found a strong correlation between being an anti-vaxxer and accepting conspiracy theories such as the ones surrounding the JFK assassination.

So learning some science and critical thinking are insulation against being suckered by counterfactual nonsense of all kinds.  Which is why yes, I do care that people are making false claims about a piece of Mayan artwork... and so should you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)