There truly is something to be said about the anger about your life not living up to the "you are so clever and you will do such great things" that Katie mentioned. I truly am in the thick of it at the moment. I'm like, how do I have two master's degrees and speak four languages and yet still have a dead-end job that pays barely above minimum wage? In my case I do think class was definitely a factor. I'm the first person in my extended family to have graduated high school (and almost the only one, I do have a younger cousin who did it, but it's really just the two of us) and I have realised over the years that the reason I am where I am is because middle and upper class people with the same intellect I have did not make the mistake of getting a master's degree in International Humanitarian Action, because they know that's a field that doesn't pay shit.
This made me wonder how many people who are "addicted to education" found sanctuary at school at young age and just kept seeking it out to the point of multiple unused degrees.
I don't think a specific upbringing prevents someone from looking up the return on investment in specific degrees, as a Google Search can unlock that sort of information. As a lower class kid, I knew to go into computer science because "they pay good." Would I have liked to get a degree in History? Sure, that sounds like a very fun four years. Would I have wanted to spend the rest of my life teaching High School history classes as a result of that degree? Absolutely not.
In fact many upper class upbringings unlock the ability to seek out many fields that do not compensate monetarily, as they would be supported financially supported by their family. I would sardonically refer to a master's degree in International Humanitarian Action as a trust fund degree.
I was specifically led to believe that a master's degree in International Humanitarian Action would lead me to the UN and/or big NGOs, because someone I met when I was in high school was able to do that. Of course he didn't mention that on top of the degree he had family connections already working at the NRC that got him an internship there after which he was hired and that's how he was able to make 5000 euros a month straight out of the degree working in Caracas. For the rest of us peasants we are lucky if we get a volunteering position paid 800 euros a month in the West Bank.
I imagine that internship was probably unpaid as well, and I'm sure his family financed his living expenses during that time. I imagine the non-profit sector is a lot more nepotistic for these purposes.
Again, its very important to tell the people in your life to look up median earnings and what a professional life post-education looks like in your field of choice.
I wonder if the average lifetime earnings decrease on 2+ post-grad degrees. Something for me to look into.
My sister got a degree in "scenic design" and arrived on the employment scene to find that it was saturated with trust-fund babies working for free, often with parents providing the appropriate grease to get them the positions. It's a real problem and I don't think it's readily apparent to outsiders before they start shopping their CV around.
Oh 100%. I could see that many of the kids getting PhDs in my university were doing it because they were afraid of the "real world" or just couldn't figure out how to make it there.
Having parents who coach and usher you into success is the biggest thing. In collage all my friends naturally just knew about what internships were and how to apply for them even during freshman year and be ready to move over the summer to wherever. I had never heard of them and just assumed collage kids went home and got jobs. I had parents who were college educated and helped me get into school but suddenly I felt underprepared for actual jobs.
Oh this is so true. I did not understand the internship game and, even if I did, I had no "ins" to get one and no funds to do anything over the summer but to live at home and work. Once I got to law school (which felt like an inevitable option at the end of college) I did figure out the internship thing - and it turned out I had one "in" - I was distantly related to a federal magistrate judge by marriage. That is how I got a great resume line - I was "family or friend." But if I wasn't? I probably would not have had the job. And it was in my home town, so I slept on the living room floor at my grandmother's for two summers.
Higher education does a phenomenal job at gatekeeping people from jobs. Especially if you are unfortunate enough to not fully understand your strengths/interests as they apply to work until you’re in your 30s.
I still maintain that outside of stem degrees and a few other exceptions. You can teach a 120 iq to do pretty much any job reasonably well in about a month. Within 6 months of that training, they'll likely be pretty good at it.
Degrees are just there to act as a filter for how many hoops you're willing to jump through for a paycheck. The more tolerance for hoop jumping, the better.
Also there are jobs that pay well because there degree required keeps the selection of candidates available small. Actually a lot of jobs.
I think the thing that makes people smart is curiosity. So many people lack curiosity, if they did not learn it in school they complain about their schooling, totally pretending a shit ton of knowledge isn’t easily accessible in their pockets.
Curiosity is a common trait for smart kids, that's certainly true. I would add though that being able to sift through and understand concepts quickly makes curiosity fun, and not a large time/effort drag. I think that's likely what kills that instinct for many people.
It's absolutely true that middle class people have a better view of the field and give their kids better advice. (Whether they take it or not is a different matter.) They also teach their kids soft skills that help with getting a job. I really think those soft skills are more important. I have seen "first in family" kids fail for stupid shit like not taking responsibility for their mistakes, showing up at work hung over or worse, or just not knowing how to dress for an interview.
I read a thing ages ago about British actors dominating in Hollywood. This casting agent was saying she was absolutely convinced that manners made it possible, not just the talent. When a young man stands up whenever you walk into a room, greets you with a smile and a handshake and a “how do you do”, you remember him. There’s something still impressive about confident manners. This is a big thing that working class kids may not be taught that makes a big difference.
My son is in second grade, and this year he had to do a 15-min powerpoint presentation to teach his classmates something. While he did most of the work, I found myself preaching good presentation skills at him, and making him sit through a quick YouTube journey through good and bad presentations. So basically, he's eight and we are already teaching him professional skills.
I think in many cases the gifted programs are a refuge for kids who are advanced for their age to make friends more than anything. Otherwise advanced kids get left to their own devices for long periods of time in school, often to their detriment. Its not fair, but Katie is right. Some kids do just learn faster than others, in much the same way that some kids are athletically gifted you just have to make your peace with where you are.
I think the analogy of mental horsepower goes a long way with IQ. You still need traction and a delivery method for that power to make it really go. Your family situation, the cultural and economic situations and lots of other factors play a significant enough role to make "success" a very hard metric to track alongside IQ.
The gifted programs in my community were like a refuge for nerdy kids who were bullied in mainstream education. They were much more welcoming for bookish and eccentric children.
For me it was just putting all the kids that the teachers didnt know what to do with in the same spot. My first grade teacher just left me alone to read and go to the library while she was teaching the other kids to read. I corrected my second grade teacher on her horrible geography and magically it was too much and I got shunted into gifted and talented. 😂😂
Part of me still thinks that half the purpose or gifted programs is just to get advanced kids out of the way of teaching to the middle and bottom of the classes. Many times, very smart kids who are just quiet will not get put into those programs because they aren't causing an issue in the classroom.
Sure - but then at the same time you have Brett Weinstein come on and tout the “benefits” of ivermectin- which has been well studied and conclusively proved to have no effect in meaningful clinical trials repeatedly.
The point still stands - you need to have someone on the show who is an actual expert who may have points of disagreement.
Is there some way I could use AI to create a combined book, something like "Drink Your Way to Becoming a Mythical Genius" ? I'd be interested in reading that!
Helen and Katie did close to a million bazillion times better than Douglas Murray and Sam Harris explaining why having cranks on your show to go unchallenged is socially irresponsible (eg Joe Rogan)
Seriously guys, listen up. They nailed the rhetoric.
I thought it was obnoxious. All of the hand wringing about Joe Rogan’s guests frustrates me because it’s premised on the ideas that a) Rogan listeners believe everything they hear on the show, and b) Rogan listeners don’t consume any other media, both of which are wrong. All of this worrying made sense in the pre-internet world, but now it doesn’t. If a crank goes on Rogan, or any other big podcast and says some bullshit, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to go viral clowning on said crank. In a free speech society we should be free to play with ideas publicly, even dangerous ones. And boohoo if the establishment has to stand up for itself. If they’re truly correct it should be an easy fight for them to win.
Tell that to my brother in law who won’t stop talking to me about ancient pre ice age civilizations every holiday. I want to send that crank “archeologist” into the sun
I agree. The argument seems to be that if you have a big platform you Must Be 100% Serious About Everything. All Facts Must Be Checked, And Balance Must Be Offered.
It's Rogan's platform, and everyone freely listens to it. We all make our own decisions and judgements about the comedians, politicians, fighters and what they say on our own.
Sheesh. If they're all idiots on his platform, let them speak their idiocy so we know they're idiots... or so we can gleam some insight into the source of their "idiocy."
That’s kind of like the thinking behind the argument that if teenage girls consume “toxic” romance books/movies, they’ll inevitably end up in one themselves. It presumes that they have no other exposure to the outside world beyond one source of entertainment.
I agree. I've been a Rogan listener for years. Here's the big catch, I only listen when its comedians I like and guests that are well known or experts in their field. Its a pretty easy thing to recognize.
I'm not going to say every listener is the same as me, but a huge percentage of listeners are this way with his podcast.
As an aside, saying Dave Smith is just a comedian is not accurate. He's very active in the libertarian party and has a big influence within it. Its also true that Dave needs to stop hiding behind that label.
You may want to consider that you are not the average Joe Rogan listener and that a lot of them don’t consume media outside of the bro-pod ecosphere because of their distrust of the ‘MSM’.
Didn't Murray also seal his fate when he criticized Rogan's "appeals to authority," while asking for more authorities on the topics to be platformed? That was weak-sauce.
Helen struggles with so many basic concepts within the psychology of intelligence that I don’t even know where to start. She gives this vague, hand-wavy argument about how IQ test are biased, but they’re far more reliable than letters of recommendation or interviews, which tend to favor the wealthy and well-connected more than gifted poor kids who are at risk of being overlooked.
She also claims that verbal tests of intelligence are useless because they’re only measuring culture or something. This is false; in fact, verbal tests are far less susceptible to the practice effect than math tests, which are easier to ace if one hires an expensive tutor.
The point is that IQ tests are just a test. There is nothing magical about them that means they measure something more “inherent” than other tests. They are reliable predictors of success in western education because The more you participate in a western education the better you will do at them. People who advance through a western education at a faster rate will do better on IQ tests because that’s what IQ tests also measure - aptitude at western education. People who continue to do tasks like those measures on IQ tests through their life will also continue to perform well on IQ tests.
It’s super obvious that many of the questions are incredibly culturally bound, like the example she gave but also I’ve seen examples that involve basically walking around a city using landmarks like libraries and post offices. If you don’t live around those things you’re gonna do worse.
Am I saying there’s no difference people individuals in their aptitude for western education? Obviously not. But that difference is based on a ton of things which also impact performance on IQ tests (like various personality traits such as concientiousness).
This seems pretty false. There are studies on how much practicing can make a difference on IQ tests. Unfortunately, there tends to be a limit.
Also, there are lots of IQ questions that aren't testing what you have learned in school. For example, the ones about rotating a shape.
"Intelligence" is definitely a thing. It's not the ONLY thing that matters in life ... I think bravery, for example, plays a huge role in life outcomes. Certainly industriousness does, too. But as far as I know all evidence points to intelligence existing (It also just makes sense. We've all been around people who could think faster than us or had better memory than us. Well, except that one person who is the smartest person in the world, whoever he/she is...).
What’s “false” in what I said? Of course intelligence is a thing that has some natural aptitude - but what an IQ measures is… ability to take an IQ test. Which is also influenced by practicing the skills the IQ test measures.
A good analogy is a test of running speed, say a 100 meter dash. No one would try to argue that running speed doesnt have some contribution from natural athleticism. But equally no one would try to argue that your running speed doesnt also depend on some contribution from practice. And not just directly practicing running but time spent playing other sports, generally being active and fit, etc.
And Yet you have IQ twitter out here arguing that somehow the IQ test measures only innate intelligence and NOT relevant practice (eg practice at analytical - western - education). That’s just as silly as it would be for the running example. It should be evident to everyone.
IQ tests arent useless - but they become useless when we pretend they are something they are not - a measure of innate intelligence only.
Well, for practical purposes outside of school settings, IQ + educational attainment predicts job success better than educational attainment alone. Poor but gifted kids have a better chance at job assessments that are similar to IQ tests (eg technical interviews) as opposed to credential box checking (like selecting for an Ivy degree) or unstructured interviews
Sure. Educational attainment is too course a measure (there are only like 8 possible values). Almost any additional information will improve the model, including test score. I posit that any test of the same types of skills we use day to day in the intellectual professions that everyone takes could add that extra value. It could be the SAT or ACT or a standardized test kids take earlier on. Again nothing magical about IQ.
I agree that interviews and letter writing are biased measures of the likelihood of job success that can be easily gamed. My objection is only to the idea that what IQ tests measure is solely some “innate general intelligence”. They measure the ability to take an IQ test, nothing more. If you took a genetically super intelligent person and raised them in a box with no objects to rotate and didn’t teach them to read they will fail the IQ test.
Sure, IQ is just a measurement, but it's one of the most studied and reliable ones we know of for what it measures and predicts.
I'm not sure if Helen makes good points or not - I got way too bored listening to her and Katie make fun of Elon's dancing. For all I know, Helen's book is good.
My son was given some iq or cognitive assessment in kindergarten and did very poorly on comprehension part (maybe called differently, it's been few years). When I looked at questions they asked, a lot of them referenced the Cinderella story and Jack and the beanstalk, that my son never even heard of. Maybe this is one the reasons these tests are not very reliable.
why are you being like this? I just dug through my son's IEP records from 2018. Multiple tests were performed as a part of his assessment, one of them was TERA-4, it's used by multiple school districts, not just MA where i am. From the top of the google results also MN and TX, but i too lazy to search further.
this is from the report:
"Overall, on Tera-4, Ian obtained a general Reading Index of 91; his score corresponds to a percentile rank of 27"
"Ian had difficulty when asked to identify the names of three familiar (!) stories (i.e., Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the beanstalk, The three little pigs) when shown a picture from each."
This is not an IQ test though, it is a part a standard assessment for children. Some parts are more abstract and do not include references to any FAMILIAR stories
Some people are really invested in the idea that any measure of “IQ” or “cognitive ability” is some objective measure of your actual intelligence stat, like in an RPG, that has nothing to do with practice or learned skills or knowledge.
Examples like this, which are legion, are dismissed in order to keep doubt at bay. identity as a “high IQ person”. Or even worse, self identity as a member of a “high IQ race” are powerful to peoples worldviews and difficult to shake
My daughter at three failed the “itsy bisty spider test” which is meant to be a test of fine motor skills. But Because we hadn’t happened to have taught her that particular song/game she had no idea what the doctor was asking…
I studied the criticism of IQ tests for Psychology A Level, and Helen is bang-on that the verbal tests used for years have a lot of cultural references that can trip up someone who does not belong to the culture of the test-writer.
That includes references that are just dated - which is why the age-adjustment process produces some wacky results. Have they identified a super-intelligent child or have they simply found an unusual child who has come across a lot of references their peers have not?
Culture is so ingrained in us that often culturally-specific references are invisible to someone from that culture.
And of course other values seep in. I remember the example of one test question being what would you do if you found an unposted letter on the ground?
Post it; Open it. That is a morality test not an intelligence test.
I think because like much of her work, it's a thinly-veiled kinda takedown attempt versus an actually open-minded or insightful analysis of something. I think that's why much of her focus is "look how dysfunctional and ungenius-like these supposed geniuses are." She said herself that the takeaway from all her research was that maybe people weren't geniuses as much as that there are certain people who are occasional possessed by genius. A pretty empty and purely semantic thesis if you ask me.
Rogan had several men who were highly respected in their fields of medicine on his show to talk about Covid. Because they had some differing opinions on the handling of the virus and protocols being followed, they had been censored. None of the corporate news media would dare have them on because the pharmaceutical companies buy ad time on all their shows. Any information that differed from what was pushed, “safe and effective”, would never see the light of day.
But Rogan also had complete cranks, liars, conspiracy theorists who spouted not merely complete bs, but dangerous bs.
The problem isn’t whether he had on serious people who espoused heterodox views that exposed problems with group think and the ‘establishment’ closed ranks, it’s because his motivations appears not to have been a health scepticism in search of the truth but a broadly conspiratorial view that THEY in the ‘mainstream’ are LYING TO US.
Whatever failures there were with something as complex as a global pandemic response, lurching to a kind of relativism & simplistically sweeping claims about the ‘establishment’ & ‘experts’ just makes people more not less likely to just accept things that confirm their political priors.
Part of the problem is that many of Rogan’s critics ALSO fail to distinguish between “complete cranks” and “serious people with heterodox views”, scorning both as unacceptable for “platforming”.
Hell, look at the abuse Jesse gets.
If Rogan gets treated the same whoever he invites, if moderate voices get treated as cranks for accepting a Rogan invite… what’s the incentive?
Sure, which is why the biggest problem is as HL articulated not necessarily who he platforms, but why or the manner in which it’s done.
If he had Bret Weinstein on but had either done some proper prep himself or better had an epidemiologist alongside to point out the crankery it wouldn’t be a problem.
Would there still be people outraged he ‘platformed’ Weinstein, sure.
Those people are imo just another category of crank.
But deeply researched hard hitting questions and adversarial intellectual debates aren’t really the Rogan brand. It’s unreasonable to expect him to completely retool his successful formula into Crossfire or whatever - plus I’m not sure he’s smart enough for that, to be honest. But he does seem willing to give a fair listen to basically anyone that will accept his invite.
Not demonizing moderate voices who go on his show would be a good start to balance the views there - the left is shooting itself in the foot by refusing to go where the voters are, because they think they still have a death grip on culture and can make things go away by “canceling” them. (And maybe the Murray thing suggest the tide is shifting a little there)
And a little constructive criticism thrown Joe’s way is fine, but if I were him I’d have tuned out that whole side years ago because of the histrionics. The signal to noise ratio there is crap.
“Not demonizing moderate voices who go on his show would be a good start”
This is a complete strawman. He can have on whoever he likes, it’s not the issue.
As was said on the pod the issue is his approach and starting point, which is whether it’s someone ‘moderate’ or a total loon, if you’re approaching the issue from a unserious conspiratorial perspective THATs the problem.
The ‘right’ (if we’re playing that game) haven’t even remotely made the same effort to scrutinise the ‘dissenting voices’ anything like the degree they do to mainstream ones they routinely claim are LYING TO THE PEOPLE.
They hypocrisy can be seen from outer space and it’s hardly surprising because they’re not interested in and have made zero effort to try reestablish any kind of trust in what are supposed to be independent institutions, they’ve just weaponised them for partisan purposes straight after accusing the democrats of doing the same thing.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. It’s kind of hard to appeal to authority these days when authority is infested with propaganda and narrative.
The Covid debacle in particular still bothers me. It’s truly infuriating that I still genuinely feel like I was at least 6 months ahead of THE EXPERTS because I listened to people that were called conspiracy theorists and loons and whack jobs. I never bought the mainstream lies and I was almost always right not to. No accountability for that. But Rogan gets called out for this?
" I still genuinely feel like I was at least 6 months ahead of THE EXPERTS because I listened to people that were called conspiracy theorists and loons and whack jobs. I never bought the mainstream lies and I was almost always right not to"
How did you know that the people you listened to and believed were correct? Like KNOW know?
I am assuming that you didn't replicate all the studies they were citing by yourself in six months.
Almost all of this boils down to which side you choose to believe. And who we choose to believe boils down to what conforms closest to our pre-conceived notions and personalities.
Couldn't the people you listened to just have easily been wrong? And given that, shouldn't we be more humble and offer grace to those who believed other experts?
What did the mainstream say? No mask, mask, 6 feet, EVERYONE needs the vaccines, the vaccines prevent spread, shutting schools down won’t affect learning, it definitely did not come from a Chinese lab, etc.
People with different views were silenced, lost their jobs, attacked, arrested, and publicly ridiculed. Our civil liberties were strung up, beaten and gutted. Instead of being reasonable, it was seen as an excuse for real authoritarianism.
Just about everything that THE EXPERTS were pushing was bullshit. We know that now.
I didn’t buy any of that. I never got vaccinated, my one Covid encounter was mild, I never volunteered to wear a mask. I did not trust the science and as far as I know now just about everything the establishment types said about the whole thing was crap. And then when the real truth started becoming more accepted, nobody apologized to the people who got shit on or lost their jobs over the whole 2 years of pandemic insanity.
I’m saying my view was rational and reasonable and logical. And by my own, biased, estimation I was on the money 9/10 times. I’m not just stroking myself off overall here, I’m fucking retarded. But when it came to Covid I was right not to trust the people that I was supposed to. Scientists and politicians and leaders lied out of their fucking asses for years and I will never believe their horse shit after that.
And I know I was right because the things I believed were seen as wrong or anti science or racist until they weren’t. I’m saying I was one of the grandma killing crazy anti vax people until, oh look, turns out I was right.
It’s a lot like pointing out that Biden had a severe mental decline that was denied by EVERYONE until it suddenly wasn’t. It turns out, no shit, I was right. They were fucking gaslighting me for years.
And I will provide forgiveness and grace to any individual who repents, but THE ESTABLISHMENT as a class or concept has shown itself for what it is and I will not forgive that. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the whole, “Oh, it was a weird time, decisions were made, mistakes happen, let’s move on.” Fuck that. Fuck that sideways. Tell that to the people who couldn’t visit their family members as they died alone. Or all the developmentally stunted kids that got shut away for years. Or the people who lost their businesses.
THEY took a huge shit on us peasants and then turned around and said, “That was a wild time, huh guys? Anyway get back to work.”
Obviously I’m still mad about this. It was unfair and there has been no accountability as far as I know. So fuck ‘em.
Can’t speak for the other poster but with Covid, I found that following health experts and agencies from different countries gave me a better way to understand what’s going on. For instance, Sweden took the path that Dr Bhattacharya (who was blacklisted in US mainstream media) took and you could get an evidence backed perspective for those advocating a different approach in Roganesque forums. Also, a lot of what experts were saying (6 ft distance, cloth masks, vaccine even if you recovered from COVID) seemed the opposite of most respiratory viruses.
Everyone's answer for this is different. For me, I did the math for the probability of my demographic having serious effects or illness. I realized I was more likely to die in a car crash literally every day, and then promptly stopped caring about covid. This was in like.....may? Of 2020. For several more years they refused to let young people who were at very close to zero risk live their lives normally.
💯 All the more so because not a single expert- establishment or marginalized- who turned out to be right about some things wasn’t also wrong about others. It’s all retrospective mythologization at this point.
If I may, I think this sort of lingering resentment towards both mainstream/legacy media figures and, well, public authority figures/experts more broadly is part and parcel of what Douglas Murray was debating Rogan and Dave Smith about on that controversial JRE episode. And without cosigning any of his political beliefs, his past reporting, or his particular opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, I think it's plain to see that what he was getting at is most definitely true.
If I could sum that up succinctly, I think it'd sound something like this: during Trump's first term, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Biden presidency, a majority of prominent experts and authority figures lied (or at least reprehensibly misled) the public about the basic facts of what was happening in the world, and made a strong effort—often quite successfully—to de-platform, blackball, or otherwise silence dissenting voices (some of whom who were later revealed to have been right). That doesn't, however, mean that experts and authority figures aren't extremely important, or that they ought to never be listened to or trusted again.
If the American public never again trusts experts or public authorities in the way that they did between 1945-2016, I think our chances of maintaining our status as the world's foremost economic, military, and political power are impossibly thin. It's not clear to what degree the onus ought to be on those experts and public authorities to earn back our trust, but it is almost certainly an existential requirement that they somehow do.
I think the basic issue is that the mainstream view during COVID acted like it was appealing to expertise, but was actually just appealing to authority.
There were certainly some (too many) outright cases of “lying for the greater good”, but the more common issue was treating the experts’ best guess on imperfect data as if it were irrefutable truth. Which of course it couldn’t be given the uncertainty and rapidly changing nature of the situation.
And then the experts got high on their own supply. They knew what was best - so why present uncertainty? Feed the dumb rubes clear instructions and tell them whatever was required to push them toward correct behavior, even if it involved some white lies or inflating certainty. And once they’d crossed that line, they were tempted to cross more. Oh, suddenly I’ve been elevated from obscure medical nerd to national hero? Mayyyyybe I can use the power of my title to push my politics. What could it hurt? Racism is really bad, after all…
We know who you're talking about. And despite their credientials they were still full of crank ideas that remain incorrect to this day. This post hoc raltionalization and gloating is very unbecoming.
But Rogan also had complete cranks, liars, conspiracy theorists who spouted not merely complete bs, but dangerous bs.
The problem isn’t whether he had on serious people who espoused heterodox views that exposed problems with group think and the ‘establishment’ closed ranks, it’s because his motivations appears not to have been a healthy scepticism in search of the truth but a broadly conspiratorial view that THEY in the ‘mainstream’ are LYING TO US.
Whatever failures there were with something as complex as a global pandemic response, lurching to a kind of relativism & simplistically sweeping claims about the ‘establishment’ & ‘experts’ just makes people more not less likely to just accept things that confirm their political priors.
“…because his motivations appears not to have been a healthy scepticism in search of the truth but a broadly conspiratorial view…” is itself redolent of conspiracy theory thinking.
Conspiracies smuggle in a premise that there is a real but secret reason behind every action that *they* can discern even if Occam’s Razor would suggest something else.
In this case the simplest explanation is that a curious journalist with somewhat hard-to-classify views was just trying to have interesting conversations, not to prove some kind of larger “they’re lying to us” point. Extrapolating from that to say there was another angle or that it was all orchestrated in service of a “righteous cause” is simply tying the same red string between disassociated ideas on a cork board.
In Rogan’s case there’s plenty of evidence that if his starting point isn’t actually conspiratorial it’s very much hinting in that direction, rather than just a product of critical thinking.
Also, since when is Rogan a journalist?
You wouldn’t expect a journalist to chuck alien pyramids guy & Bret Weinstein in the same ‘just having interesting conversations’ bucket.
Sure, let's say he's not a journalist - he's a podcaster, a "media persona", whatever you want to call him. It still doesn't show that there's some kind of master plan or angle involved. The whole angle assumes facts not in evidence, which is a core component of conspiracy thinking.
I agree with you in the broad sense. Unfortunately, none of these experts have admitted to getting it wrong and say they’ll do better in the future. They continue to push vaccines on 6 month olds, and have not been honest about side effects. If nothing else, get the drug companies out of advertising.
Yes you’re right, but not one corporate news outlet ever had an “expert” with different views on their broadcasts. Science is all about opposing viewpoints and working towards a solution; not one team saying we’re right and everyone else is dangerous.
“but not one corporate news outlet ever had an “expert” with different views on their broadcasts”
That’s simply untrue in terms of policy response, but also it depends on what you mean by different views. I wouldn’t necessarily expect any mainstream outlet to platform anti vaxxers as if it they were just one of ‘two sides’.
Anyone who expressed any concern over vaccine side effects was labeled an anti vaxxer.
Anyone who talked about a lab leak was called a crank and a racist.
Anyone who suggested masks was an idiot, until they flipped and anyone who didn’t want to mask was a right wing granny killer.
Anyone who thought maybe being outside was pretty low risk was an evil right wing granny killer, until it was decided that being in huge groups was okay as long as it was for BLM.
Anyone who wanted to go to their grandma’s funeral was evil, until all the celebs needed a good photo op with George Floyd’s corpse (but not letting YOUR grandma die scared and alone was still evil).
Anyone who expressed any interest in alternative treatments was “telling people to take horse pills” (no, ivermectin is not an effective treatment for COVID, but there were some reasons/dafa to believe it might be at least worth investigating, at least initially).
The idea that contrary views were welcome is revisionist. There was a party line, and there was huge pressure to not deviate from it because “this is a crisis and these are the experts”. There was zero tolerance for dissenting views - even legitimate ones that would later become the party line.
As a result you got whiplash, because “the experts” were so brittle. By treating everything they said (even if it was just an educated guess made under pressure) as gospel truth, they left no wiggle room for honest (and expected) errors. It was all a massive appeal to authority that fell apart as soon as the authority wasn’t infallible.
On the other side, anyone with reasonable objections was cowed into silence so the only dissenting voices were cranks who didn’t give a shit about mainstream respectability.
The only revisionist thing is these wild sweeping generalisations.
Anyone who tried to suggest that in anything as complex as a global pandemic there were always going to be mistakes and much of the hysteria about the ‘lies’ was driven by people with a political agenda, not some deep concern for the ‘truth’ was labelled an elitist with a contempt for ordinary people….see this game is easy.
Really not interested in playing, as it sheds little light on anything.
I was simply commenting to say that HL was spot on about Rogan, he’s not a serious person when it comes to something like this & it’s a problem. No, it’s not the only problem but it’s not great someone with his mindset & lack of responsibility has the platform he does.
Is it literally true that not a single dissenting voice was ever allowed in mainstream sources ever? Of course not. (Never without significant pushback might be closer to true) But these were definitely the exceptions, and if they were mainstream enough they’d be hit with a barrage of online complaints about “platforming”. Often from blue checks who maybe weren’t technically speaking officially for mainstream media outlets, but had their bios touting their employment at such institutions prominently.
“It depends what you mean by different views”. There’s the rub. In the mainstream, there absolutely was a sense of “two sides”, and even mild dissent was treated as being on the wrong one. The problem wasn’t that they banned antivaxx cranks, it’s that they tended to assume any version of “hey have we looked into young adult myocarditis” was antivaxx crankery.
As absolutes, my statements are untrue. As generalizations, they are pretty valid.
No, they remain wild generalisations as they both overstate the extent of it, don’t allow at all for why in the circumstances there was never going to be the level of on going debate as there would on a different subject, or that the people claiming this are very quick to point out issues with the ‘establishment’ view but way slower to acknowledge that a lot of the dissenters were completely full of shit or simply pushing an agendas.
There’s also the fact that a big part of this is that these days in US almost everything seems to separate on partisan lines.
The segment covering the Douglas Murray appearance on Joe Rogan was really tough to listen to.
Katie's suggestion that "it's irresponsible to have these casual error-riddled conversations" without having some expert there to "check them" is profoundly frustrating and entirely devoid of self-awareness.
In the context of the Douglas Murray's appearance, which largely centered around foreign policy matters, Murray would be presented as being "the expert," but why? What credential does he carry that Dave Smith or Joe Rogan don't? Academically, he has a bachelor's degree in English. That's it. Does his title of "journalist" automatically carry with it the credential of "expert" somehow? He's written books, to be sure, but I think we all realize that that is evidence of nothing.
Instead, Murray has a long history of being on the wrong side of literally every foreign policy decision the U.S. (and U.K.) have made in the past 25 years -- that is a credential neither Smith nor Rogan have.
This gets vastly more absurd when one considers the example Katie cites, that it'd be warranted to have some sort of idea-chaperone present when Bret Weinstein, someone with a PhD in evolutionary biology, was the guest discussing something that is outside his realm of expertise. (Weinstein is also a published author.)
If Weinstein's appearance on Rogan warranted an expert chaperoning the conversation, then Jesse's almost certainly would have as well. Who would have been assigned to that task, taking into consideration that it was taped in June of 2021?
I strongly bristle at the suggestion that certain people and ideas need to be closely monitored and "fact-checked" in real time because they could spread "dangerous" ideas. BaRPod would absolutely come out of the losing end of such a mandate and I suspect that had a "Joe Rogan expert" been present during the taping of this BaRPod episode, he/she/they/ze (but let's be real, almost certainly "he") would have interjected more than a few times during Katie and Helen's discussion.
Malcolm Gladwell had a more pragmatic take on it on his Revisionist History pod, that Rogan needs to be personally willing to disagree with guests when HE thinks they're wrong about something.
It's simultaneously true that Rogan deserves the freedom to make his own podcast AND that he consistently gives an extremely sympathetic hearing to people with ideas that are just wrong (on vaccines etc). Gladwell makes the case for a line between actor Woody Harrelson and RFK Jr that, as of now, actually killed some people due to govt policy decisions.
I agree that Jesse and Katie's faux-technocratic tendencies can be annoying, since their idea of who counts as an expert only turns generous when it comes to something they (without any advanced education in the subject themselves) want to write about. But Rogan has so much money that he can not only pay for live fact-checking or w/e, he could pay for intelligent producers to think about how to outmaneuver the issue altogether in a way that hasn't occurred to the rest of us. So just shouting "do something!" at him is fair IMO.
This is probably the best approach, both for spending time nearer to "the truth," and, as a result, a more satisfying conversation.
There is another podcaster that I don't listen to anymore simply because he refused to interrogate the views expressed by his guests. He'd have Kari Lake on one week and Cenk Uygur on the next, and at no point would he provide any resistance to what either party was spouting, even though they were polar opposites. (I don't listen to Rogan nearly often enough to know how much/little he pushes back against ideas he believes are flawed.)
The strength of podcasts is that they're an excellent medium for challenging and exploring ideas. If ideas are going to go unchallenged, then it may as well be an audiobook or magazine article. I think that's a major reason why the Dave Smith v. Doug Murray episode has been so talked about. It setup a rare opportunity for hotly discussed--though rarely debated--ideas to actually be debated. Unfortunately, one of the parties refused to engaged with the arguments that were being presented and instead spent his time focusing on what he perceived as being the inadequacy of the credentials of his both his present opposition and an imaginary non-present opposition.
Yet, I guess Murray didn't fail entirely because, in spite of his refusal/inability to grapple with the arguments that were being presented, there are still parties, like Helen, that appear to think he succeeded to some degree in steering some imagined information-control ship back in the direction of expertism/credentialism, which is a wildly different response than what I have seen across the various circles of the internet that I'm exposed to. (That response being, in short, "This Murray guy is a pathetic tool.")
I'm not sure what you mean with that first part, Rogan seems pretty willing to tell guests when he disagrees with them.
He's just open minded and polite enough to be amicable about it, and he's not die-hard about pushing an agenda or insisting that someone's wrong unless it's a subject he has a lot of expertise or confidence in.
Basically if a guest says something that's wrong in 15 different ways, Rogan doesn't have the right structure to chase down each of those problems, and he just moves on rather than linger. This gives an uninformed audience the idea that there's one or two little problems with an idea, when in fact there are many.
Gladwell gives a good example in the show about a guy claiming the Spanish Flu killed people with bacteria rather than a virus. It's actually the case that the virus weakened people's immune systems enough that they were more susceptible to bacteria and so died, but it is literally true that the virus didn't cause symptoms that directly killed people. So when Rogan goes "Jamie, pull that study up" and it shows "the virus didn't directly kill people", that launders a piece of strong negative evidence into mild positive evidence.
Interviewers are supposed to get past this by playing devil's advocate for the positions their guests are arguing against, to remind the audience that the guest has an agenda even if they don't have the time to reveal all of the holes in their argument. But Rogan's whole thing is NOT doing that, so he needs some other tool if he's not going to push bullshit onto people.
I’m surprised we’re still having the “Joe Rogan needs to conduct his podcast in this certain way and it’s irresponsible to do otherwise” conversation. I’ve listened to tons of his podcasts and turned them off because I found the guests annoying or talking what seemed to me as pure bullshit. People don’t just lap up every word the guy says.
So what you're saying is "Joe Rogan does not have to abide by journalistic standards". You called them "my journalistic standards" but they are just standards actually. The alternative media sphere is partly predicated on the low standards of the "mainstream media", which Rogan constantly goes on about - but his own standards have turned out to be (surprise surprise) much lower once the stakes went up.
Shouldn't Rogan be held to some sort of standard in terms of fact checking if he is to be this influential? He obviously should. Applying those kinds of standards in public life is what has led to a stable, productive, predicable world. So stable we can take it for granted and decide to throw it all away because chaos is more fun.
Yes absolutely if he's going to conduct a crucially important interview that affects everyone's life it is important to try to ensure what he is saying is actually true, and not just a load of bullshit designed to get us (and him) riled up. Which is what it is. It's unlistenable at this point, although it was fine 5 years ago.
I have a lot of disagreements and nits to pick in here, but I guess my main issue is a practical one.
What the hell would that look like? His show is a 3-4 hour rambling interview and he is opposed to editing out anything besides pee breaks or technical difficulties. Is he going to hire a team of fact checkers to whisper into his headphones mid conversation as he slowly morphs from his #1 position into another waning cable news interview show? How reliable are the fact checkers? More reliable than his producer + Google, but the fact checking industry has its own issues.
And what’s the subscriber number where someone goes from a bro with a podcast to a journalist? Or is it a topic that one mustn’t broach in public without crossing the journalistic threshold? Is it a guest?
Donald Trump went on Theo Von’s podcast and asked him questions about cocaine… is Theo a journalist now? Or is Trump the journalist in this situation? Did Donald Trump fall short of his journalistic standards when he didn’t point out to Theo’s audience that cocaine does not, indeed “turn you into a damn owl, homie?”
I don't know what it would look like. That's his problem to solve. He could certainly afford a very large team of fact checkers.
My point is that what Rogan, and theo von and everyone has ended up doing is harming social stability by repeating inflammatory claims that are objectively not true. They do this because people like to watch it. They enjoy themselves and they get rich, so of course they are going to do it.
As I vaguely understand it there was a period in the 18th and/or 19th century when there was a mountain of bullshit being published in the form of pamphlets. Eventually it settled into newspapers which had somewhaat higher standards.
I think it was probably libel law that calmed it down. Having to prove the truth of what you're saying in court for some reason is the only way. The US does have libel law and it's a bit stricter than many imagine I think. When/if this finally settles down that will probably be the mechanism.
The way we enforce socially desirable behaviours in our western societies without tyranny is called "the rule of law". It has been a matter of academic debate for a few centuries whether rule of law makes us more, or less free. What would you say about that? Were we more free without laws? I think not, and I think Jefferson and those guys would strongly agree with me.
So in this framework, we’re in a second printing press era? I don’t think that’s a bad illustration. I’m also not sure that’s a bad place to be.
I think you’re incorrect about the strength of US libel law. You have to prove actual malice in the US, not just an insufficient Jamie googling. That would have to be a significant disregard for stare decises in order to address your qualms through that legal avenue.
As far as founders (Jefferson and those guys) agreeing with you, I think “those guys” is too wide a net. I think Mr Jefferson penned something concerning certain freedoms that butt right up against the idea that restrictions are freedoms disguised as restrictions.
In fairness to Katie and Jesse, they made this same argument a few years ago as well. I didn’t like it then either. I think sometimes people forget just how many fuckin people he’s had on his podcast over the years and how many people of many different viewpoints on the same issues. He’s even had the same guests on multiple times as well to talk about the same shit over and over. Maybe he’s consolidated guests more into people he tends to agree with in recent years, that’s a possibility. But after enough of these conversations, Joe Rogan still may not be an “expert” but it’s hard not to form opinions and have a viewpoint which won’t always be backed by science or even be correct. I just feel like that’s for people to make their own decisions on.
For someone with such strong opinions about Joe Rogan’s podcast, Helen sure has *dramatically* misdiagnosed its problem. (The issue is not his unwillingness to talk to people with many different viewpoints…the idea that he wouldn’t have someone like Hasan Piker on his show is an insane claim.)
I especially loved that within the span of a couple of minutes, Helen claimed both that 1) Rogan would never have someone like Hasan on his show (again, yes he would!) AND that 2) Rogan prefers to talk to cranks and conspiracy theorists (kinda true, at least recently, but Hasan is both of those things so he’d be a perfect fit).
I’m also pretty sure that both Helen and Katie completely misunderstood the Camille Paglia quote about Einstein and Manson. She wasn’t claiming that Manson is low IQ. Seems to me like she was talking about sex differences in general and comparing male intelligence patterns to a male propensity for certain kinds of violence.
Finally, some of the reductive and silly things Helen claimed about IQ during this conversation did not make me optimistic about how thorough or how compelling her book is going to be. I wanted to bang my head against the table as she was explaining, e.g., that Einstein might have just had a somewhat-above-average IQ combined with very high conscientiousness…or that the primary reason test scores correlate with class/race is because the rich are gaming the system and/or the tests are plagued with bias…or that there are “many kinds” of intelligence…or arguing against strawman claims nobody has ever made, like that having a high IQ is the Key to Happiness or that IQ tests are perfect.
I had the same response. What is the real life difference between an IQ of 85 and 100? What about 120 and 135?
My high school untracked its classes in my junior year in the 1970s due to issues of inclusion (put nicely). One only had to be in one of those untracked classes to see just how different academic abilities were. Were they just an issue that under-performing kids did not have the opportunities of over-performing kids had? Or was it the limitations on their cognitive abilities? (Just in case, the over/underperformance did not track to race or often to class)
Finally, IQ tests are of course culturally effected. I would die within days of living in the Amazon whereas those tribal folx are able to subsist. Their IQ relative to their environment is much higher than mine (in the Amazon).
They missed a golden opportunity to discuss a tie-in with contemporary cancel culture:
William Shockley, who they mention in the last 10 minutes of the episode, wasn't just a genius who invented the transistor, and also an infamous eugenicist.
He was also a famous world-class rock climber, who is know for (among other things) establishing some classical rock climbing routes in The Gunks in upstate New York.
The most famous of which is called 'Shockley's Ceiling' - or at least it was, until recently.
Some time around 2020, when woke hysteria was at its peak, there was an extremely stupid campaign in the rock climbing world (which oddly has a very strong woke contingent in modern times) to change the name of problematic route names.
By tradition, whoever establishes a new route (basically climbs a certain vertical path for the first time) gets to name it. Until recently, rock climbing always had a sort of rebellious, fringe, edgy dirtbag culture, so many route names are whimsical, crude, humorous, and often deemed offensive by modern standards.
So given a need to ruin absolutely everything under the face of the sun, or maybe they just couldn't find any more statues to tear down or anything better to be outraged about, the woke contingent set about changing any route names that they deemed sexist, racist, or homophobic, or in this case contained the name of a problematic historical figure.
Now you can't actually stop people from calling a route what they want to, but you can pressure the publishers of guidebooks (which are increasingly online or in the form of apps), and online route databases, and you can also correct people whenever they mention the name of a route on Facebook or in climbing specific forums.. All of which they did.
So in most places online, or any recently printed books, that route is now called 'The Ceiling', and there is often no mention of William Shockley at all.
This is because of his views on Eugenics, which sounds pretty bad if you know nothing about the subject other than spending thirty seconds on his Wikipedia page.
As I understand it, he wasn't some hate-filled bigot, he simply had some scientific views that turned out to be wrong. He wasn't in favor of violating anyone's rights. He basically thought that stupid people shouldn't be breeding, and that we should pay people to voluntarily be sterilized, for the betterment of society. He also beleived that black people were less intelligent genetically.
You can say this was wrong, but I think that hardly makes him a monster. Hell tons of people beleive similar things today (minus the racist part), I mean that's kind of the premise of the movie Idiocracy, which everyone on the left seem to love..
But people hear the word 'Eugenics', and they picture a Nazi scientist or something..
I'm no expert, but the fact is that William Shockley was a great but flawed man, a brilliant scientist & engineer, and a legendary rock climber.
It is the result of his work that allowed the idiotic, impudent, self-righteous cunts to demonize him online and plan the removal of his name from an awesome climbing route that he established. I've climbed it multiple times by the way, it's a fantastic route.
And I will always call it Shockley's ceiling.
(That turned into more of a rant than I intended it to.. But I hope someone finds it interesting.)
Helen's comment at the beginning about being angry rather than pleased when the British Supreme Court made their ruling about sex was so interesting. I've felt that way in other contexts -- my side "won," so shouldn't I be happy? No, I'm just pissed off that we all had to go through this. I see a LOT of this attitude with regard to COVID. If the economy recovers from Trump's idiocy, I'll probably be mad that we had to go through that rather than happy it's better.
Politicians ignore this phenomenon at their peril.
Helen Lewis really annoys me at times (unfair? perhaps) because she is so icked out by the idea that the wrong group might be right in a dispute with members of her tribe that she ostentatiously has to distance herself from the people she actually agrees with and invent an imaginary centre ground to stand on. In a past discussion on objections to sexual content in school books, she had to throw in a gratuitous and unfounded “nationalist” after Christian in describing many, but by no means all of the objectors. In this one, she lamented that right-wing TERFs were setting the agenda rather than a mild trade-unionist line. There is no trade union backing any of the women in the tribunals or who have come out in support of the Supreme Court. The health unions disowned the nurses and spoke up for the rights of men to leer at them in their changing rooms and the Lecturers Union supported the tormentors of Professors Stock, Phoenix et al. They wouldn’t be keeping what she clearly regards as the disreputable company of Toby Young etc if people with a much higher profile and reputation for fearless plain-speaking like her tossrag of an editor at Private Eye showed any guts at all. She’s nowhere near as bad, but she’ll make it up when she’s worried she’s getting into too much trouble.
I think (hope?) there is a middle ground where reasonable people can grind out compromises. And I think the majority of people (who are the majority of the people, in the UK and the US) believe that sex is real. What you are describing is not how I took what she said--she's angry not because "right-wing TERFs" (whatever that is) triumphed, common sense did, and her tribe is now pretending that it didn't abandon womens' rights, that it was on the side of common sense all along.
Politicians keeling over on trans issues reminds me of when gay marriage was legalized in the US back in the 2015. Conservatives had become so worn down by that point (these were the pre-Trump conservatives) that their reaction was basically no reaction. They were just tired of fighting by that point. The same thing happened with marijuana legalization.
I’m quarreling with Helen through the entire episode. She tries to split the difference, be reasonable, but it’s not working for me anymore.
Maybe she’s unaware of all the mentally unbalanced people who believe they pass as the opposite sex, that they are the opposite sex, and simply won’t compromise on this belief to accommodate anyone.
Her knee jerk characterization of certain people being “right wing” fails to acknowledge the collapse of that paradigm largely because many people who used to think they were on the left discovered the left was detached from reality. Is it any wonder?
I completely agree with Murray's position on both Israel and Ukraine, but I think his approach on Rogan was extremely obnoxious.
I don't understand why seemingly no one on his side can see that.
They all seem to think he performed brilliantly and bravely, that it was a powerful and eloquent takedown, and Rogan and his supporters are just too stupid to realize it..
That's not what I saw happen. I saw Murray make arguments from authority, straw-men arguments, and constantly contradict himself.
The first 45 minutes basically consisted of him saying over and over that Rogan shouldn't be platforming non-experts, or that people like Dave Smith had no business talking about certain subjects, but every time if he was asked directly if they shouldn't platform certain people or discuss certain topics, he would deny it and say "no no, of course not", and then proceed to say on other words why it's bad for them to do that.
He made very few substantive arguments the entire episode. Rogan and Smith both were extremely polite and gracious, went out of their way to be friendly and laugh at Murray's jokes, even after he was extremely rude to them, and they gave him plenty of time to say anything he wanted with interruption.
And Rogan barely said anything the entire episode, so the idea that it was some sort of two vs one teamup is ridiculous.
Murray was condescending and manipulative. That "you've never been?" reaction where he pretended to be surprised and appalled was extremely fake and disingenuous, and was a bad argument anyway.
At one point Murray asked Dave Smith if he thought Gaza was like a concentration camp (which he did NOT completely agree with), and then repeatedly made it seem as if Smith was the one who made the comparison (including when talking about the show later on in subsequent interviews.
Overall, I thought Murray was a complete ass.
I got the impression that he was so accustomed to having either short sound-bite interviews, or debating with morons, or with people who only agreed with him, that he forgot how to have a real, genuine, honest discussion where he actually had to use sound reasoning to make his case.
I'm really baffled why seemingly no one (aside from me) who agrees with Murray can see how terrible a job he did making his case.
I'm in this boat. I've read a couple of Murray's books and usually agree with his premises. He looked like a total moron on Rogan. Thats why he's being mocked. The 15 second clips don't work there and he got used to that.
I love Helen as do we all but there’s nothing wrong with sorting kids by talents and preferences. We’re all different and it takes all kinds to make the world go round. It was a common carpenter who changed the world.
Students who are highly academically advanced compared to their peers can feel bored and excluded by the material in standard curricula. Bright students often want to be challenged. If you want to engage those students and get them excited about class, there needs to be some mechanism to give them material and instruction that is appropriate to their level.
It’s also just frustrating to be around a lot of people who couldn’t give a shit about what they are supposed to be learning and disrupt class instead of working.
I think instead of making “gifted and talented” classes they should go back to adding more skills- and career- based training. Do automotive, electronics, arts, or computer programming tracks for kids who Aren’t academically inclined and just want to build stuff and get jobs straight out of school instead of forcing them to take Algebra 2 and making life miserable for kids who want to learn
There truly is something to be said about the anger about your life not living up to the "you are so clever and you will do such great things" that Katie mentioned. I truly am in the thick of it at the moment. I'm like, how do I have two master's degrees and speak four languages and yet still have a dead-end job that pays barely above minimum wage? In my case I do think class was definitely a factor. I'm the first person in my extended family to have graduated high school (and almost the only one, I do have a younger cousin who did it, but it's really just the two of us) and I have realised over the years that the reason I am where I am is because middle and upper class people with the same intellect I have did not make the mistake of getting a master's degree in International Humanitarian Action, because they know that's a field that doesn't pay shit.
This made me wonder how many people who are "addicted to education" found sanctuary at school at young age and just kept seeking it out to the point of multiple unused degrees.
I don't think a specific upbringing prevents someone from looking up the return on investment in specific degrees, as a Google Search can unlock that sort of information. As a lower class kid, I knew to go into computer science because "they pay good." Would I have liked to get a degree in History? Sure, that sounds like a very fun four years. Would I have wanted to spend the rest of my life teaching High School history classes as a result of that degree? Absolutely not.
In fact many upper class upbringings unlock the ability to seek out many fields that do not compensate monetarily, as they would be supported financially supported by their family. I would sardonically refer to a master's degree in International Humanitarian Action as a trust fund degree.
I was specifically led to believe that a master's degree in International Humanitarian Action would lead me to the UN and/or big NGOs, because someone I met when I was in high school was able to do that. Of course he didn't mention that on top of the degree he had family connections already working at the NRC that got him an internship there after which he was hired and that's how he was able to make 5000 euros a month straight out of the degree working in Caracas. For the rest of us peasants we are lucky if we get a volunteering position paid 800 euros a month in the West Bank.
I imagine that internship was probably unpaid as well, and I'm sure his family financed his living expenses during that time. I imagine the non-profit sector is a lot more nepotistic for these purposes.
Again, its very important to tell the people in your life to look up median earnings and what a professional life post-education looks like in your field of choice.
I wonder if the average lifetime earnings decrease on 2+ post-grad degrees. Something for me to look into.
yes, the UN (at least in the past) offered unpaid internships that required you to be in Geneva or New York for six months.
My sister got a degree in "scenic design" and arrived on the employment scene to find that it was saturated with trust-fund babies working for free, often with parents providing the appropriate grease to get them the positions. It's a real problem and I don't think it's readily apparent to outsiders before they start shopping their CV around.
I do think if you’re going to get a degree that niche you really need to do your research to figure out what the employment landscape is like.
The art world has always been the nobility's playground.
Oh 100%. I could see that many of the kids getting PhDs in my university were doing it because they were afraid of the "real world" or just couldn't figure out how to make it there.
Having parents who coach and usher you into success is the biggest thing. In collage all my friends naturally just knew about what internships were and how to apply for them even during freshman year and be ready to move over the summer to wherever. I had never heard of them and just assumed collage kids went home and got jobs. I had parents who were college educated and helped me get into school but suddenly I felt underprepared for actual jobs.
Oh this is so true. I did not understand the internship game and, even if I did, I had no "ins" to get one and no funds to do anything over the summer but to live at home and work. Once I got to law school (which felt like an inevitable option at the end of college) I did figure out the internship thing - and it turned out I had one "in" - I was distantly related to a federal magistrate judge by marriage. That is how I got a great resume line - I was "family or friend." But if I wasn't? I probably would not have had the job. And it was in my home town, so I slept on the living room floor at my grandmother's for two summers.
Higher education does a phenomenal job at gatekeeping people from jobs. Especially if you are unfortunate enough to not fully understand your strengths/interests as they apply to work until you’re in your 30s.
I still maintain that outside of stem degrees and a few other exceptions. You can teach a 120 iq to do pretty much any job reasonably well in about a month. Within 6 months of that training, they'll likely be pretty good at it.
Degrees are just there to act as a filter for how many hoops you're willing to jump through for a paycheck. The more tolerance for hoop jumping, the better.
Also there are jobs that pay well because there degree required keeps the selection of candidates available small. Actually a lot of jobs.
I think the thing that makes people smart is curiosity. So many people lack curiosity, if they did not learn it in school they complain about their schooling, totally pretending a shit ton of knowledge isn’t easily accessible in their pockets.
Curiosity is a common trait for smart kids, that's certainly true. I would add though that being able to sift through and understand concepts quickly makes curiosity fun, and not a large time/effort drag. I think that's likely what kills that instinct for many people.
It's absolutely true that middle class people have a better view of the field and give their kids better advice. (Whether they take it or not is a different matter.) They also teach their kids soft skills that help with getting a job. I really think those soft skills are more important. I have seen "first in family" kids fail for stupid shit like not taking responsibility for their mistakes, showing up at work hung over or worse, or just not knowing how to dress for an interview.
I read a thing ages ago about British actors dominating in Hollywood. This casting agent was saying she was absolutely convinced that manners made it possible, not just the talent. When a young man stands up whenever you walk into a room, greets you with a smile and a handshake and a “how do you do”, you remember him. There’s something still impressive about confident manners. This is a big thing that working class kids may not be taught that makes a big difference.
My son is in second grade, and this year he had to do a 15-min powerpoint presentation to teach his classmates something. While he did most of the work, I found myself preaching good presentation skills at him, and making him sit through a quick YouTube journey through good and bad presentations. So basically, he's eight and we are already teaching him professional skills.
I think in many cases the gifted programs are a refuge for kids who are advanced for their age to make friends more than anything. Otherwise advanced kids get left to their own devices for long periods of time in school, often to their detriment. Its not fair, but Katie is right. Some kids do just learn faster than others, in much the same way that some kids are athletically gifted you just have to make your peace with where you are.
I think the analogy of mental horsepower goes a long way with IQ. You still need traction and a delivery method for that power to make it really go. Your family situation, the cultural and economic situations and lots of other factors play a significant enough role to make "success" a very hard metric to track alongside IQ.
The gifted programs in my community were like a refuge for nerdy kids who were bullied in mainstream education. They were much more welcoming for bookish and eccentric children.
For me it was just putting all the kids that the teachers didnt know what to do with in the same spot. My first grade teacher just left me alone to read and go to the library while she was teaching the other kids to read. I corrected my second grade teacher on her horrible geography and magically it was too much and I got shunted into gifted and talented. 😂😂
Part of me still thinks that half the purpose or gifted programs is just to get advanced kids out of the way of teaching to the middle and bottom of the classes. Many times, very smart kids who are just quiet will not get put into those programs because they aren't causing an issue in the classroom.
Jesse should be permanently banned from the pod and only appear via 3rd-person accounts of his confused, stumbling journey throughout England
Sure - but then at the same time you have Brett Weinstein come on and tout the “benefits” of ivermectin- which has been well studied and conclusively proved to have no effect in meaningful clinical trials repeatedly.
The point still stands - you need to have someone on the show who is an actual expert who may have points of disagreement.
Ok
lol, I think Bob answered the Rogan question below. But I like the comedy nature of No Jessie = Brett Weinstein comes on BARpod to champion ivermectin
“Customers who bought The Genius Myth also bought Drink Your Way Sober” —amazon
Katie’s search for a killer blurb for her book is over.
Is there some way I could use AI to create a combined book, something like "Drink Your Way to Becoming a Mythical Genius" ? I'd be interested in reading that!
Helen and Katie did close to a million bazillion times better than Douglas Murray and Sam Harris explaining why having cranks on your show to go unchallenged is socially irresponsible (eg Joe Rogan)
Seriously guys, listen up. They nailed the rhetoric.
I thought it was obnoxious. All of the hand wringing about Joe Rogan’s guests frustrates me because it’s premised on the ideas that a) Rogan listeners believe everything they hear on the show, and b) Rogan listeners don’t consume any other media, both of which are wrong. All of this worrying made sense in the pre-internet world, but now it doesn’t. If a crank goes on Rogan, or any other big podcast and says some bullshit, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to go viral clowning on said crank. In a free speech society we should be free to play with ideas publicly, even dangerous ones. And boohoo if the establishment has to stand up for itself. If they’re truly correct it should be an easy fight for them to win.
Tell that to my brother in law who won’t stop talking to me about ancient pre ice age civilizations every holiday. I want to send that crank “archeologist” into the sun
The loser to blame here is your brother, not anyone on a podcast
hey watch it pal. If anyone is gonna call my brother in law a loser, it will continue to be me.
And, no, the blame for spreading this nonsense is on Graham Hancock and Joe Rogan. Not complicated.
Sorry, I didn't realize your brother in law had no agency or critical thinking skills. That is really inconvenient for him. Makes life much harder!
lmao, first sentence was meant to be a light hearted joke. I hope you enjoy being a dick head to strangers on the internet fuck face!
I agree. The argument seems to be that if you have a big platform you Must Be 100% Serious About Everything. All Facts Must Be Checked, And Balance Must Be Offered.
It's Rogan's platform, and everyone freely listens to it. We all make our own decisions and judgements about the comedians, politicians, fighters and what they say on our own.
Sheesh. If they're all idiots on his platform, let them speak their idiocy so we know they're idiots... or so we can gleam some insight into the source of their "idiocy."
That’s kind of like the thinking behind the argument that if teenage girls consume “toxic” romance books/movies, they’ll inevitably end up in one themselves. It presumes that they have no other exposure to the outside world beyond one source of entertainment.
I agree. I've been a Rogan listener for years. Here's the big catch, I only listen when its comedians I like and guests that are well known or experts in their field. Its a pretty easy thing to recognize.
I'm not going to say every listener is the same as me, but a huge percentage of listeners are this way with his podcast.
As an aside, saying Dave Smith is just a comedian is not accurate. He's very active in the libertarian party and has a big influence within it. Its also true that Dave needs to stop hiding behind that label.
You may want to consider that you are not the average Joe Rogan listener and that a lot of them don’t consume media outside of the bro-pod ecosphere because of their distrust of the ‘MSM’.
I think people just tend to seek out things that confirm their biases. That’s true for all of us.
Didn't Murray also seal his fate when he criticized Rogan's "appeals to authority," while asking for more authorities on the topics to be platformed? That was weak-sauce.
Helen struggles with so many basic concepts within the psychology of intelligence that I don’t even know where to start. She gives this vague, hand-wavy argument about how IQ test are biased, but they’re far more reliable than letters of recommendation or interviews, which tend to favor the wealthy and well-connected more than gifted poor kids who are at risk of being overlooked.
She also claims that verbal tests of intelligence are useless because they’re only measuring culture or something. This is false; in fact, verbal tests are far less susceptible to the practice effect than math tests, which are easier to ace if one hires an expensive tutor.
The point is that IQ tests are just a test. There is nothing magical about them that means they measure something more “inherent” than other tests. They are reliable predictors of success in western education because The more you participate in a western education the better you will do at them. People who advance through a western education at a faster rate will do better on IQ tests because that’s what IQ tests also measure - aptitude at western education. People who continue to do tasks like those measures on IQ tests through their life will also continue to perform well on IQ tests.
It’s super obvious that many of the questions are incredibly culturally bound, like the example she gave but also I’ve seen examples that involve basically walking around a city using landmarks like libraries and post offices. If you don’t live around those things you’re gonna do worse.
Am I saying there’s no difference people individuals in their aptitude for western education? Obviously not. But that difference is based on a ton of things which also impact performance on IQ tests (like various personality traits such as concientiousness).
This seems pretty false. There are studies on how much practicing can make a difference on IQ tests. Unfortunately, there tends to be a limit.
Also, there are lots of IQ questions that aren't testing what you have learned in school. For example, the ones about rotating a shape.
"Intelligence" is definitely a thing. It's not the ONLY thing that matters in life ... I think bravery, for example, plays a huge role in life outcomes. Certainly industriousness does, too. But as far as I know all evidence points to intelligence existing (It also just makes sense. We've all been around people who could think faster than us or had better memory than us. Well, except that one person who is the smartest person in the world, whoever he/she is...).
What’s “false” in what I said? Of course intelligence is a thing that has some natural aptitude - but what an IQ measures is… ability to take an IQ test. Which is also influenced by practicing the skills the IQ test measures.
A good analogy is a test of running speed, say a 100 meter dash. No one would try to argue that running speed doesnt have some contribution from natural athleticism. But equally no one would try to argue that your running speed doesnt also depend on some contribution from practice. And not just directly practicing running but time spent playing other sports, generally being active and fit, etc.
And Yet you have IQ twitter out here arguing that somehow the IQ test measures only innate intelligence and NOT relevant practice (eg practice at analytical - western - education). That’s just as silly as it would be for the running example. It should be evident to everyone.
IQ tests arent useless - but they become useless when we pretend they are something they are not - a measure of innate intelligence only.
Well, for practical purposes outside of school settings, IQ + educational attainment predicts job success better than educational attainment alone. Poor but gifted kids have a better chance at job assessments that are similar to IQ tests (eg technical interviews) as opposed to credential box checking (like selecting for an Ivy degree) or unstructured interviews
Sure. Educational attainment is too course a measure (there are only like 8 possible values). Almost any additional information will improve the model, including test score. I posit that any test of the same types of skills we use day to day in the intellectual professions that everyone takes could add that extra value. It could be the SAT or ACT or a standardized test kids take earlier on. Again nothing magical about IQ.
I agree that interviews and letter writing are biased measures of the likelihood of job success that can be easily gamed. My objection is only to the idea that what IQ tests measure is solely some “innate general intelligence”. They measure the ability to take an IQ test, nothing more. If you took a genetically super intelligent person and raised them in a box with no objects to rotate and didn’t teach them to read they will fail the IQ test.
Sure, IQ is just a measurement, but it's one of the most studied and reliable ones we know of for what it measures and predicts.
I'm not sure if Helen makes good points or not - I got way too bored listening to her and Katie make fun of Elon's dancing. For all I know, Helen's book is good.
My son was given some iq or cognitive assessment in kindergarten and did very poorly on comprehension part (maybe called differently, it's been few years). When I looked at questions they asked, a lot of them referenced the Cinderella story and Jack and the beanstalk, that my son never even heard of. Maybe this is one the reasons these tests are not very reliable.
Without knowing which test your son took, we can’t say anything about its reliability or predictive power…
Tests of reading comprehension typically have several passages- so that unfamiliarity with one doesn’t skew the results.
Are you saying the fact the test creator assumed a child is familiar with these stories is irrelevant to the result?
I’m saying your anecdote about one single test doesn’t invalidate every cognitive test ever made.
why are you being like this? I just dug through my son's IEP records from 2018. Multiple tests were performed as a part of his assessment, one of them was TERA-4, it's used by multiple school districts, not just MA where i am. From the top of the google results also MN and TX, but i too lazy to search further.
this is from the report:
"Overall, on Tera-4, Ian obtained a general Reading Index of 91; his score corresponds to a percentile rank of 27"
"Ian had difficulty when asked to identify the names of three familiar (!) stories (i.e., Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the beanstalk, The three little pigs) when shown a picture from each."
This is not an IQ test though, it is a part a standard assessment for children. Some parts are more abstract and do not include references to any FAMILIAR stories
Some people are really invested in the idea that any measure of “IQ” or “cognitive ability” is some objective measure of your actual intelligence stat, like in an RPG, that has nothing to do with practice or learned skills or knowledge.
Examples like this, which are legion, are dismissed in order to keep doubt at bay. identity as a “high IQ person”. Or even worse, self identity as a member of a “high IQ race” are powerful to peoples worldviews and difficult to shake
My daughter at three failed the “itsy bisty spider test” which is meant to be a test of fine motor skills. But Because we hadn’t happened to have taught her that particular song/game she had no idea what the doctor was asking…
I studied the criticism of IQ tests for Psychology A Level, and Helen is bang-on that the verbal tests used for years have a lot of cultural references that can trip up someone who does not belong to the culture of the test-writer.
That includes references that are just dated - which is why the age-adjustment process produces some wacky results. Have they identified a super-intelligent child or have they simply found an unusual child who has come across a lot of references their peers have not?
Culture is so ingrained in us that often culturally-specific references are invisible to someone from that culture.
And of course other values seep in. I remember the example of one test question being what would you do if you found an unposted letter on the ground?
Post it; Open it. That is a morality test not an intelligence test.
I think because like much of her work, it's a thinly-veiled kinda takedown attempt versus an actually open-minded or insightful analysis of something. I think that's why much of her focus is "look how dysfunctional and ungenius-like these supposed geniuses are." She said herself that the takeaway from all her research was that maybe people weren't geniuses as much as that there are certain people who are occasional possessed by genius. A pretty empty and purely semantic thesis if you ask me.
Rogan had several men who were highly respected in their fields of medicine on his show to talk about Covid. Because they had some differing opinions on the handling of the virus and protocols being followed, they had been censored. None of the corporate news media would dare have them on because the pharmaceutical companies buy ad time on all their shows. Any information that differed from what was pushed, “safe and effective”, would never see the light of day.
But Rogan also had complete cranks, liars, conspiracy theorists who spouted not merely complete bs, but dangerous bs.
The problem isn’t whether he had on serious people who espoused heterodox views that exposed problems with group think and the ‘establishment’ closed ranks, it’s because his motivations appears not to have been a health scepticism in search of the truth but a broadly conspiratorial view that THEY in the ‘mainstream’ are LYING TO US.
Whatever failures there were with something as complex as a global pandemic response, lurching to a kind of relativism & simplistically sweeping claims about the ‘establishment’ & ‘experts’ just makes people more not less likely to just accept things that confirm their political priors.
Part of the problem is that many of Rogan’s critics ALSO fail to distinguish between “complete cranks” and “serious people with heterodox views”, scorning both as unacceptable for “platforming”.
Hell, look at the abuse Jesse gets.
If Rogan gets treated the same whoever he invites, if moderate voices get treated as cranks for accepting a Rogan invite… what’s the incentive?
Sure, which is why the biggest problem is as HL articulated not necessarily who he platforms, but why or the manner in which it’s done.
If he had Bret Weinstein on but had either done some proper prep himself or better had an epidemiologist alongside to point out the crankery it wouldn’t be a problem.
Would there still be people outraged he ‘platformed’ Weinstein, sure.
Those people are imo just another category of crank.
But deeply researched hard hitting questions and adversarial intellectual debates aren’t really the Rogan brand. It’s unreasonable to expect him to completely retool his successful formula into Crossfire or whatever - plus I’m not sure he’s smart enough for that, to be honest. But he does seem willing to give a fair listen to basically anyone that will accept his invite.
Not demonizing moderate voices who go on his show would be a good start to balance the views there - the left is shooting itself in the foot by refusing to go where the voters are, because they think they still have a death grip on culture and can make things go away by “canceling” them. (And maybe the Murray thing suggest the tide is shifting a little there)
And a little constructive criticism thrown Joe’s way is fine, but if I were him I’d have tuned out that whole side years ago because of the histrionics. The signal to noise ratio there is crap.
“Not demonizing moderate voices who go on his show would be a good start”
This is a complete strawman. He can have on whoever he likes, it’s not the issue.
As was said on the pod the issue is his approach and starting point, which is whether it’s someone ‘moderate’ or a total loon, if you’re approaching the issue from a unserious conspiratorial perspective THATs the problem.
The ‘right’ (if we’re playing that game) haven’t even remotely made the same effort to scrutinise the ‘dissenting voices’ anything like the degree they do to mainstream ones they routinely claim are LYING TO THE PEOPLE.
They hypocrisy can be seen from outer space and it’s hardly surprising because they’re not interested in and have made zero effort to try reestablish any kind of trust in what are supposed to be independent institutions, they’ve just weaponised them for partisan purposes straight after accusing the democrats of doing the same thing.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. It’s kind of hard to appeal to authority these days when authority is infested with propaganda and narrative.
The Covid debacle in particular still bothers me. It’s truly infuriating that I still genuinely feel like I was at least 6 months ahead of THE EXPERTS because I listened to people that were called conspiracy theorists and loons and whack jobs. I never bought the mainstream lies and I was almost always right not to. No accountability for that. But Rogan gets called out for this?
The double standard is bullshit.
" I still genuinely feel like I was at least 6 months ahead of THE EXPERTS because I listened to people that were called conspiracy theorists and loons and whack jobs. I never bought the mainstream lies and I was almost always right not to"
How did you know that the people you listened to and believed were correct? Like KNOW know?
I am assuming that you didn't replicate all the studies they were citing by yourself in six months.
Almost all of this boils down to which side you choose to believe. And who we choose to believe boils down to what conforms closest to our pre-conceived notions and personalities.
Couldn't the people you listened to just have easily been wrong? And given that, shouldn't we be more humble and offer grace to those who believed other experts?
What did the mainstream say? No mask, mask, 6 feet, EVERYONE needs the vaccines, the vaccines prevent spread, shutting schools down won’t affect learning, it definitely did not come from a Chinese lab, etc.
People with different views were silenced, lost their jobs, attacked, arrested, and publicly ridiculed. Our civil liberties were strung up, beaten and gutted. Instead of being reasonable, it was seen as an excuse for real authoritarianism.
Just about everything that THE EXPERTS were pushing was bullshit. We know that now.
I didn’t buy any of that. I never got vaccinated, my one Covid encounter was mild, I never volunteered to wear a mask. I did not trust the science and as far as I know now just about everything the establishment types said about the whole thing was crap. And then when the real truth started becoming more accepted, nobody apologized to the people who got shit on or lost their jobs over the whole 2 years of pandemic insanity.
I’m saying my view was rational and reasonable and logical. And by my own, biased, estimation I was on the money 9/10 times. I’m not just stroking myself off overall here, I’m fucking retarded. But when it came to Covid I was right not to trust the people that I was supposed to. Scientists and politicians and leaders lied out of their fucking asses for years and I will never believe their horse shit after that.
And I know I was right because the things I believed were seen as wrong or anti science or racist until they weren’t. I’m saying I was one of the grandma killing crazy anti vax people until, oh look, turns out I was right.
It’s a lot like pointing out that Biden had a severe mental decline that was denied by EVERYONE until it suddenly wasn’t. It turns out, no shit, I was right. They were fucking gaslighting me for years.
And I will provide forgiveness and grace to any individual who repents, but THE ESTABLISHMENT as a class or concept has shown itself for what it is and I will not forgive that. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the whole, “Oh, it was a weird time, decisions were made, mistakes happen, let’s move on.” Fuck that. Fuck that sideways. Tell that to the people who couldn’t visit their family members as they died alone. Or all the developmentally stunted kids that got shut away for years. Or the people who lost their businesses.
THEY took a huge shit on us peasants and then turned around and said, “That was a wild time, huh guys? Anyway get back to work.”
Obviously I’m still mad about this. It was unfair and there has been no accountability as far as I know. So fuck ‘em.
Can’t speak for the other poster but with Covid, I found that following health experts and agencies from different countries gave me a better way to understand what’s going on. For instance, Sweden took the path that Dr Bhattacharya (who was blacklisted in US mainstream media) took and you could get an evidence backed perspective for those advocating a different approach in Roganesque forums. Also, a lot of what experts were saying (6 ft distance, cloth masks, vaccine even if you recovered from COVID) seemed the opposite of most respiratory viruses.
Everyone's answer for this is different. For me, I did the math for the probability of my demographic having serious effects or illness. I realized I was more likely to die in a car crash literally every day, and then promptly stopped caring about covid. This was in like.....may? Of 2020. For several more years they refused to let young people who were at very close to zero risk live their lives normally.
I stopped trusting the "experts" when it became obvious they just get off on controlling people.
I am pro-vaccine though. The epidemiologists crying about BLM and the magatards crying about their autism both suck.
💯 All the more so because not a single expert- establishment or marginalized- who turned out to be right about some things wasn’t also wrong about others. It’s all retrospective mythologization at this point.
From what I understand Big Pharma also funds the FDA. To what extent I don’t know, but that just seems so wrong.
Well if they didn't then it would require the government to recruit taxes from elsewhere to fund them. I wonder what DOGE would think of that.
If I may, I think this sort of lingering resentment towards both mainstream/legacy media figures and, well, public authority figures/experts more broadly is part and parcel of what Douglas Murray was debating Rogan and Dave Smith about on that controversial JRE episode. And without cosigning any of his political beliefs, his past reporting, or his particular opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, I think it's plain to see that what he was getting at is most definitely true.
If I could sum that up succinctly, I think it'd sound something like this: during Trump's first term, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Biden presidency, a majority of prominent experts and authority figures lied (or at least reprehensibly misled) the public about the basic facts of what was happening in the world, and made a strong effort—often quite successfully—to de-platform, blackball, or otherwise silence dissenting voices (some of whom who were later revealed to have been right). That doesn't, however, mean that experts and authority figures aren't extremely important, or that they ought to never be listened to or trusted again.
If the American public never again trusts experts or public authorities in the way that they did between 1945-2016, I think our chances of maintaining our status as the world's foremost economic, military, and political power are impossibly thin. It's not clear to what degree the onus ought to be on those experts and public authorities to earn back our trust, but it is almost certainly an existential requirement that they somehow do.
I think the basic issue is that the mainstream view during COVID acted like it was appealing to expertise, but was actually just appealing to authority.
There were certainly some (too many) outright cases of “lying for the greater good”, but the more common issue was treating the experts’ best guess on imperfect data as if it were irrefutable truth. Which of course it couldn’t be given the uncertainty and rapidly changing nature of the situation.
And then the experts got high on their own supply. They knew what was best - so why present uncertainty? Feed the dumb rubes clear instructions and tell them whatever was required to push them toward correct behavior, even if it involved some white lies or inflating certainty. And once they’d crossed that line, they were tempted to cross more. Oh, suddenly I’ve been elevated from obscure medical nerd to national hero? Mayyyyybe I can use the power of my title to push my politics. What could it hurt? Racism is really bad, after all…
We know who you're talking about. And despite their credientials they were still full of crank ideas that remain incorrect to this day. This post hoc raltionalization and gloating is very unbecoming.
But Rogan also had complete cranks, liars, conspiracy theorists who spouted not merely complete bs, but dangerous bs.
The problem isn’t whether he had on serious people who espoused heterodox views that exposed problems with group think and the ‘establishment’ closed ranks, it’s because his motivations appears not to have been a healthy scepticism in search of the truth but a broadly conspiratorial view that THEY in the ‘mainstream’ are LYING TO US.
Whatever failures there were with something as complex as a global pandemic response, lurching to a kind of relativism & simplistically sweeping claims about the ‘establishment’ & ‘experts’ just makes people more not less likely to just accept things that confirm their political priors.
“…because his motivations appears not to have been a healthy scepticism in search of the truth but a broadly conspiratorial view…” is itself redolent of conspiracy theory thinking.
Not sure what that’s supposed to mean.
Conspiracies smuggle in a premise that there is a real but secret reason behind every action that *they* can discern even if Occam’s Razor would suggest something else.
In this case the simplest explanation is that a curious journalist with somewhat hard-to-classify views was just trying to have interesting conversations, not to prove some kind of larger “they’re lying to us” point. Extrapolating from that to say there was another angle or that it was all orchestrated in service of a “righteous cause” is simply tying the same red string between disassociated ideas on a cork board.
In Rogan’s case there’s plenty of evidence that if his starting point isn’t actually conspiratorial it’s very much hinting in that direction, rather than just a product of critical thinking.
Also, since when is Rogan a journalist?
You wouldn’t expect a journalist to chuck alien pyramids guy & Bret Weinstein in the same ‘just having interesting conversations’ bucket.
Sure, let's say he's not a journalist - he's a podcaster, a "media persona", whatever you want to call him. It still doesn't show that there's some kind of master plan or angle involved. The whole angle assumes facts not in evidence, which is a core component of conspiracy thinking.
I agree. It’s a saw that cuts both ways.
I agree with you in the broad sense. Unfortunately, none of these experts have admitted to getting it wrong and say they’ll do better in the future. They continue to push vaccines on 6 month olds, and have not been honest about side effects. If nothing else, get the drug companies out of advertising.
The childhood vaccination schedule is proven to be safe and effective.
You have been listening to far too many anti-vaxxer cranks if you think otherwise.
Yes you’re right, but not one corporate news outlet ever had an “expert” with different views on their broadcasts. Science is all about opposing viewpoints and working towards a solution; not one team saying we’re right and everyone else is dangerous.
“but not one corporate news outlet ever had an “expert” with different views on their broadcasts”
That’s simply untrue in terms of policy response, but also it depends on what you mean by different views. I wouldn’t necessarily expect any mainstream outlet to platform anti vaxxers as if it they were just one of ‘two sides’.
Anyone who expressed any concern over vaccine side effects was labeled an anti vaxxer.
Anyone who talked about a lab leak was called a crank and a racist.
Anyone who suggested masks was an idiot, until they flipped and anyone who didn’t want to mask was a right wing granny killer.
Anyone who thought maybe being outside was pretty low risk was an evil right wing granny killer, until it was decided that being in huge groups was okay as long as it was for BLM.
Anyone who wanted to go to their grandma’s funeral was evil, until all the celebs needed a good photo op with George Floyd’s corpse (but not letting YOUR grandma die scared and alone was still evil).
Anyone who expressed any interest in alternative treatments was “telling people to take horse pills” (no, ivermectin is not an effective treatment for COVID, but there were some reasons/dafa to believe it might be at least worth investigating, at least initially).
The idea that contrary views were welcome is revisionist. There was a party line, and there was huge pressure to not deviate from it because “this is a crisis and these are the experts”. There was zero tolerance for dissenting views - even legitimate ones that would later become the party line.
As a result you got whiplash, because “the experts” were so brittle. By treating everything they said (even if it was just an educated guess made under pressure) as gospel truth, they left no wiggle room for honest (and expected) errors. It was all a massive appeal to authority that fell apart as soon as the authority wasn’t infallible.
On the other side, anyone with reasonable objections was cowed into silence so the only dissenting voices were cranks who didn’t give a shit about mainstream respectability.
Anyone anyone anyone.
The only revisionist thing is these wild sweeping generalisations.
Anyone who tried to suggest that in anything as complex as a global pandemic there were always going to be mistakes and much of the hysteria about the ‘lies’ was driven by people with a political agenda, not some deep concern for the ‘truth’ was labelled an elitist with a contempt for ordinary people….see this game is easy.
Really not interested in playing, as it sheds little light on anything.
I was simply commenting to say that HL was spot on about Rogan, he’s not a serious person when it comes to something like this & it’s a problem. No, it’s not the only problem but it’s not great someone with his mindset & lack of responsibility has the platform he does.
Is it literally true that not a single dissenting voice was ever allowed in mainstream sources ever? Of course not. (Never without significant pushback might be closer to true) But these were definitely the exceptions, and if they were mainstream enough they’d be hit with a barrage of online complaints about “platforming”. Often from blue checks who maybe weren’t technically speaking officially for mainstream media outlets, but had their bios touting their employment at such institutions prominently.
“It depends what you mean by different views”. There’s the rub. In the mainstream, there absolutely was a sense of “two sides”, and even mild dissent was treated as being on the wrong one. The problem wasn’t that they banned antivaxx cranks, it’s that they tended to assume any version of “hey have we looked into young adult myocarditis” was antivaxx crankery.
As absolutes, my statements are untrue. As generalizations, they are pretty valid.
No, they remain wild generalisations as they both overstate the extent of it, don’t allow at all for why in the circumstances there was never going to be the level of on going debate as there would on a different subject, or that the people claiming this are very quick to point out issues with the ‘establishment’ view but way slower to acknowledge that a lot of the dissenters were completely full of shit or simply pushing an agendas.
There’s also the fact that a big part of this is that these days in US almost everything seems to separate on partisan lines.
I’m obviously not going to change anyone’s mind.
Thank you, well said
The segment covering the Douglas Murray appearance on Joe Rogan was really tough to listen to.
Katie's suggestion that "it's irresponsible to have these casual error-riddled conversations" without having some expert there to "check them" is profoundly frustrating and entirely devoid of self-awareness.
In the context of the Douglas Murray's appearance, which largely centered around foreign policy matters, Murray would be presented as being "the expert," but why? What credential does he carry that Dave Smith or Joe Rogan don't? Academically, he has a bachelor's degree in English. That's it. Does his title of "journalist" automatically carry with it the credential of "expert" somehow? He's written books, to be sure, but I think we all realize that that is evidence of nothing.
Instead, Murray has a long history of being on the wrong side of literally every foreign policy decision the U.S. (and U.K.) have made in the past 25 years -- that is a credential neither Smith nor Rogan have.
This gets vastly more absurd when one considers the example Katie cites, that it'd be warranted to have some sort of idea-chaperone present when Bret Weinstein, someone with a PhD in evolutionary biology, was the guest discussing something that is outside his realm of expertise. (Weinstein is also a published author.)
If Weinstein's appearance on Rogan warranted an expert chaperoning the conversation, then Jesse's almost certainly would have as well. Who would have been assigned to that task, taking into consideration that it was taped in June of 2021?
I strongly bristle at the suggestion that certain people and ideas need to be closely monitored and "fact-checked" in real time because they could spread "dangerous" ideas. BaRPod would absolutely come out of the losing end of such a mandate and I suspect that had a "Joe Rogan expert" been present during the taping of this BaRPod episode, he/she/they/ze (but let's be real, almost certainly "he") would have interjected more than a few times during Katie and Helen's discussion.
Malcolm Gladwell had a more pragmatic take on it on his Revisionist History pod, that Rogan needs to be personally willing to disagree with guests when HE thinks they're wrong about something.
It's simultaneously true that Rogan deserves the freedom to make his own podcast AND that he consistently gives an extremely sympathetic hearing to people with ideas that are just wrong (on vaccines etc). Gladwell makes the case for a line between actor Woody Harrelson and RFK Jr that, as of now, actually killed some people due to govt policy decisions.
I agree that Jesse and Katie's faux-technocratic tendencies can be annoying, since their idea of who counts as an expert only turns generous when it comes to something they (without any advanced education in the subject themselves) want to write about. But Rogan has so much money that he can not only pay for live fact-checking or w/e, he could pay for intelligent producers to think about how to outmaneuver the issue altogether in a way that hasn't occurred to the rest of us. So just shouting "do something!" at him is fair IMO.
This is probably the best approach, both for spending time nearer to "the truth," and, as a result, a more satisfying conversation.
There is another podcaster that I don't listen to anymore simply because he refused to interrogate the views expressed by his guests. He'd have Kari Lake on one week and Cenk Uygur on the next, and at no point would he provide any resistance to what either party was spouting, even though they were polar opposites. (I don't listen to Rogan nearly often enough to know how much/little he pushes back against ideas he believes are flawed.)
The strength of podcasts is that they're an excellent medium for challenging and exploring ideas. If ideas are going to go unchallenged, then it may as well be an audiobook or magazine article. I think that's a major reason why the Dave Smith v. Doug Murray episode has been so talked about. It setup a rare opportunity for hotly discussed--though rarely debated--ideas to actually be debated. Unfortunately, one of the parties refused to engaged with the arguments that were being presented and instead spent his time focusing on what he perceived as being the inadequacy of the credentials of his both his present opposition and an imaginary non-present opposition.
Yet, I guess Murray didn't fail entirely because, in spite of his refusal/inability to grapple with the arguments that were being presented, there are still parties, like Helen, that appear to think he succeeded to some degree in steering some imagined information-control ship back in the direction of expertism/credentialism, which is a wildly different response than what I have seen across the various circles of the internet that I'm exposed to. (That response being, in short, "This Murray guy is a pathetic tool.")
I'm not sure what you mean with that first part, Rogan seems pretty willing to tell guests when he disagrees with them.
He's just open minded and polite enough to be amicable about it, and he's not die-hard about pushing an agenda or insisting that someone's wrong unless it's a subject he has a lot of expertise or confidence in.
Basically if a guest says something that's wrong in 15 different ways, Rogan doesn't have the right structure to chase down each of those problems, and he just moves on rather than linger. This gives an uninformed audience the idea that there's one or two little problems with an idea, when in fact there are many.
Gladwell gives a good example in the show about a guy claiming the Spanish Flu killed people with bacteria rather than a virus. It's actually the case that the virus weakened people's immune systems enough that they were more susceptible to bacteria and so died, but it is literally true that the virus didn't cause symptoms that directly killed people. So when Rogan goes "Jamie, pull that study up" and it shows "the virus didn't directly kill people", that launders a piece of strong negative evidence into mild positive evidence.
Interviewers are supposed to get past this by playing devil's advocate for the positions their guests are arguing against, to remind the audience that the guest has an agenda even if they don't have the time to reveal all of the holes in their argument. But Rogan's whole thing is NOT doing that, so he needs some other tool if he's not going to push bullshit onto people.
I'd never take an IQ test, why would I want to know for sure that I am stupid
(This fact alone proves your intelligence, to me!)
Don’t hate on me but I found this episode kinda insipid.
I’m surprised we’re still having the “Joe Rogan needs to conduct his podcast in this certain way and it’s irresponsible to do otherwise” conversation. I’ve listened to tons of his podcasts and turned them off because I found the guests annoying or talking what seemed to me as pure bullshit. People don’t just lap up every word the guy says.
No but now he's had Trump on so everything's different and he has to abide by my journalistic standards.
So what you're saying is "Joe Rogan does not have to abide by journalistic standards". You called them "my journalistic standards" but they are just standards actually. The alternative media sphere is partly predicated on the low standards of the "mainstream media", which Rogan constantly goes on about - but his own standards have turned out to be (surprise surprise) much lower once the stakes went up.
Shouldn't Rogan be held to some sort of standard in terms of fact checking if he is to be this influential? He obviously should. Applying those kinds of standards in public life is what has led to a stable, productive, predicable world. So stable we can take it for granted and decide to throw it all away because chaos is more fun.
Yes absolutely if he's going to conduct a crucially important interview that affects everyone's life it is important to try to ensure what he is saying is actually true, and not just a load of bullshit designed to get us (and him) riled up. Which is what it is. It's unlistenable at this point, although it was fine 5 years ago.
I have a lot of disagreements and nits to pick in here, but I guess my main issue is a practical one.
What the hell would that look like? His show is a 3-4 hour rambling interview and he is opposed to editing out anything besides pee breaks or technical difficulties. Is he going to hire a team of fact checkers to whisper into his headphones mid conversation as he slowly morphs from his #1 position into another waning cable news interview show? How reliable are the fact checkers? More reliable than his producer + Google, but the fact checking industry has its own issues.
And what’s the subscriber number where someone goes from a bro with a podcast to a journalist? Or is it a topic that one mustn’t broach in public without crossing the journalistic threshold? Is it a guest?
Donald Trump went on Theo Von’s podcast and asked him questions about cocaine… is Theo a journalist now? Or is Trump the journalist in this situation? Did Donald Trump fall short of his journalistic standards when he didn’t point out to Theo’s audience that cocaine does not, indeed “turn you into a damn owl, homie?”
I don't know what it would look like. That's his problem to solve. He could certainly afford a very large team of fact checkers.
My point is that what Rogan, and theo von and everyone has ended up doing is harming social stability by repeating inflammatory claims that are objectively not true. They do this because people like to watch it. They enjoy themselves and they get rich, so of course they are going to do it.
As I vaguely understand it there was a period in the 18th and/or 19th century when there was a mountain of bullshit being published in the form of pamphlets. Eventually it settled into newspapers which had somewhaat higher standards.
I think it was probably libel law that calmed it down. Having to prove the truth of what you're saying in court for some reason is the only way. The US does have libel law and it's a bit stricter than many imagine I think. When/if this finally settles down that will probably be the mechanism.
The way we enforce socially desirable behaviours in our western societies without tyranny is called "the rule of law". It has been a matter of academic debate for a few centuries whether rule of law makes us more, or less free. What would you say about that? Were we more free without laws? I think not, and I think Jefferson and those guys would strongly agree with me.
So in this framework, we’re in a second printing press era? I don’t think that’s a bad illustration. I’m also not sure that’s a bad place to be.
I think you’re incorrect about the strength of US libel law. You have to prove actual malice in the US, not just an insufficient Jamie googling. That would have to be a significant disregard for stare decises in order to address your qualms through that legal avenue.
As far as founders (Jefferson and those guys) agreeing with you, I think “those guys” is too wide a net. I think Mr Jefferson penned something concerning certain freedoms that butt right up against the idea that restrictions are freedoms disguised as restrictions.
In fairness to Katie and Jesse, they made this same argument a few years ago as well. I didn’t like it then either. I think sometimes people forget just how many fuckin people he’s had on his podcast over the years and how many people of many different viewpoints on the same issues. He’s even had the same guests on multiple times as well to talk about the same shit over and over. Maybe he’s consolidated guests more into people he tends to agree with in recent years, that’s a possibility. But after enough of these conversations, Joe Rogan still may not be an “expert” but it’s hard not to form opinions and have a viewpoint which won’t always be backed by science or even be correct. I just feel like that’s for people to make their own decisions on.
It's the "platforming" debate, washed and reused. It's always asinine because it's always subjective.
Granted, there's an important difference between saying someone should be more careful and someone should be silenced.
I started scrolling Twitter halfway through and I like Herzog and Lewis podcast
For someone with such strong opinions about Joe Rogan’s podcast, Helen sure has *dramatically* misdiagnosed its problem. (The issue is not his unwillingness to talk to people with many different viewpoints…the idea that he wouldn’t have someone like Hasan Piker on his show is an insane claim.)
I especially loved that within the span of a couple of minutes, Helen claimed both that 1) Rogan would never have someone like Hasan on his show (again, yes he would!) AND that 2) Rogan prefers to talk to cranks and conspiracy theorists (kinda true, at least recently, but Hasan is both of those things so he’d be a perfect fit).
I’m also pretty sure that both Helen and Katie completely misunderstood the Camille Paglia quote about Einstein and Manson. She wasn’t claiming that Manson is low IQ. Seems to me like she was talking about sex differences in general and comparing male intelligence patterns to a male propensity for certain kinds of violence.
Finally, some of the reductive and silly things Helen claimed about IQ during this conversation did not make me optimistic about how thorough or how compelling her book is going to be. I wanted to bang my head against the table as she was explaining, e.g., that Einstein might have just had a somewhat-above-average IQ combined with very high conscientiousness…or that the primary reason test scores correlate with class/race is because the rich are gaming the system and/or the tests are plagued with bias…or that there are “many kinds” of intelligence…or arguing against strawman claims nobody has ever made, like that having a high IQ is the Key to Happiness or that IQ tests are perfect.
Yeah, the Paglia quote was about temperament and how men are capable of extreme greatness and depravity, whereas women are more stable.
I had the same response. What is the real life difference between an IQ of 85 and 100? What about 120 and 135?
My high school untracked its classes in my junior year in the 1970s due to issues of inclusion (put nicely). One only had to be in one of those untracked classes to see just how different academic abilities were. Were they just an issue that under-performing kids did not have the opportunities of over-performing kids had? Or was it the limitations on their cognitive abilities? (Just in case, the over/underperformance did not track to race or often to class)
Finally, IQ tests are of course culturally effected. I would die within days of living in the Amazon whereas those tribal folx are able to subsist. Their IQ relative to their environment is much higher than mine (in the Amazon).
Of course, I'm not that smart anyway.
The higher IQ Amazon tribesmen are much more successful in hunting and social rituals than their lower IQ peers.
They missed a golden opportunity to discuss a tie-in with contemporary cancel culture:
William Shockley, who they mention in the last 10 minutes of the episode, wasn't just a genius who invented the transistor, and also an infamous eugenicist.
He was also a famous world-class rock climber, who is know for (among other things) establishing some classical rock climbing routes in The Gunks in upstate New York.
The most famous of which is called 'Shockley's Ceiling' - or at least it was, until recently.
Some time around 2020, when woke hysteria was at its peak, there was an extremely stupid campaign in the rock climbing world (which oddly has a very strong woke contingent in modern times) to change the name of problematic route names.
By tradition, whoever establishes a new route (basically climbs a certain vertical path for the first time) gets to name it. Until recently, rock climbing always had a sort of rebellious, fringe, edgy dirtbag culture, so many route names are whimsical, crude, humorous, and often deemed offensive by modern standards.
So given a need to ruin absolutely everything under the face of the sun, or maybe they just couldn't find any more statues to tear down or anything better to be outraged about, the woke contingent set about changing any route names that they deemed sexist, racist, or homophobic, or in this case contained the name of a problematic historical figure.
Now you can't actually stop people from calling a route what they want to, but you can pressure the publishers of guidebooks (which are increasingly online or in the form of apps), and online route databases, and you can also correct people whenever they mention the name of a route on Facebook or in climbing specific forums.. All of which they did.
So in most places online, or any recently printed books, that route is now called 'The Ceiling', and there is often no mention of William Shockley at all.
This is because of his views on Eugenics, which sounds pretty bad if you know nothing about the subject other than spending thirty seconds on his Wikipedia page.
As I understand it, he wasn't some hate-filled bigot, he simply had some scientific views that turned out to be wrong. He wasn't in favor of violating anyone's rights. He basically thought that stupid people shouldn't be breeding, and that we should pay people to voluntarily be sterilized, for the betterment of society. He also beleived that black people were less intelligent genetically.
You can say this was wrong, but I think that hardly makes him a monster. Hell tons of people beleive similar things today (minus the racist part), I mean that's kind of the premise of the movie Idiocracy, which everyone on the left seem to love..
But people hear the word 'Eugenics', and they picture a Nazi scientist or something..
I'm no expert, but the fact is that William Shockley was a great but flawed man, a brilliant scientist & engineer, and a legendary rock climber.
It is the result of his work that allowed the idiotic, impudent, self-righteous cunts to demonize him online and plan the removal of his name from an awesome climbing route that he established. I've climbed it multiple times by the way, it's a fantastic route.
And I will always call it Shockley's ceiling.
(That turned into more of a rant than I intended it to.. But I hope someone finds it interesting.)
Helen's comment at the beginning about being angry rather than pleased when the British Supreme Court made their ruling about sex was so interesting. I've felt that way in other contexts -- my side "won," so shouldn't I be happy? No, I'm just pissed off that we all had to go through this. I see a LOT of this attitude with regard to COVID. If the economy recovers from Trump's idiocy, I'll probably be mad that we had to go through that rather than happy it's better.
Politicians ignore this phenomenon at their peril.
She's right. People have been attacked, lost their jobs, been questioned by the police. I'd be angry, too.
Helen Lewis really annoys me at times (unfair? perhaps) because she is so icked out by the idea that the wrong group might be right in a dispute with members of her tribe that she ostentatiously has to distance herself from the people she actually agrees with and invent an imaginary centre ground to stand on. In a past discussion on objections to sexual content in school books, she had to throw in a gratuitous and unfounded “nationalist” after Christian in describing many, but by no means all of the objectors. In this one, she lamented that right-wing TERFs were setting the agenda rather than a mild trade-unionist line. There is no trade union backing any of the women in the tribunals or who have come out in support of the Supreme Court. The health unions disowned the nurses and spoke up for the rights of men to leer at them in their changing rooms and the Lecturers Union supported the tormentors of Professors Stock, Phoenix et al. They wouldn’t be keeping what she clearly regards as the disreputable company of Toby Young etc if people with a much higher profile and reputation for fearless plain-speaking like her tossrag of an editor at Private Eye showed any guts at all. She’s nowhere near as bad, but she’ll make it up when she’s worried she’s getting into too much trouble.
I think (hope?) there is a middle ground where reasonable people can grind out compromises. And I think the majority of people (who are the majority of the people, in the UK and the US) believe that sex is real. What you are describing is not how I took what she said--she's angry not because "right-wing TERFs" (whatever that is) triumphed, common sense did, and her tribe is now pretending that it didn't abandon womens' rights, that it was on the side of common sense all along.
Politicians keeling over on trans issues reminds me of when gay marriage was legalized in the US back in the 2015. Conservatives had become so worn down by that point (these were the pre-Trump conservatives) that their reaction was basically no reaction. They were just tired of fighting by that point. The same thing happened with marijuana legalization.
Bring on the lawsuits against child-gender-transition. That's anger with results, and monetary pain. I'm all for it.
I’m quarreling with Helen through the entire episode. She tries to split the difference, be reasonable, but it’s not working for me anymore.
Maybe she’s unaware of all the mentally unbalanced people who believe they pass as the opposite sex, that they are the opposite sex, and simply won’t compromise on this belief to accommodate anyone.
Her knee jerk characterization of certain people being “right wing” fails to acknowledge the collapse of that paradigm largely because many people who used to think they were on the left discovered the left was detached from reality. Is it any wonder?
I completely agree with Murray's position on both Israel and Ukraine, but I think his approach on Rogan was extremely obnoxious.
I don't understand why seemingly no one on his side can see that.
They all seem to think he performed brilliantly and bravely, that it was a powerful and eloquent takedown, and Rogan and his supporters are just too stupid to realize it..
That's not what I saw happen. I saw Murray make arguments from authority, straw-men arguments, and constantly contradict himself.
The first 45 minutes basically consisted of him saying over and over that Rogan shouldn't be platforming non-experts, or that people like Dave Smith had no business talking about certain subjects, but every time if he was asked directly if they shouldn't platform certain people or discuss certain topics, he would deny it and say "no no, of course not", and then proceed to say on other words why it's bad for them to do that.
He made very few substantive arguments the entire episode. Rogan and Smith both were extremely polite and gracious, went out of their way to be friendly and laugh at Murray's jokes, even after he was extremely rude to them, and they gave him plenty of time to say anything he wanted with interruption.
And Rogan barely said anything the entire episode, so the idea that it was some sort of two vs one teamup is ridiculous.
Murray was condescending and manipulative. That "you've never been?" reaction where he pretended to be surprised and appalled was extremely fake and disingenuous, and was a bad argument anyway.
At one point Murray asked Dave Smith if he thought Gaza was like a concentration camp (which he did NOT completely agree with), and then repeatedly made it seem as if Smith was the one who made the comparison (including when talking about the show later on in subsequent interviews.
Overall, I thought Murray was a complete ass.
I got the impression that he was so accustomed to having either short sound-bite interviews, or debating with morons, or with people who only agreed with him, that he forgot how to have a real, genuine, honest discussion where he actually had to use sound reasoning to make his case.
I'm really baffled why seemingly no one (aside from me) who agrees with Murray can see how terrible a job he did making his case.
I'm in this boat. I've read a couple of Murray's books and usually agree with his premises. He looked like a total moron on Rogan. Thats why he's being mocked. The 15 second clips don't work there and he got used to that.
100% agree with your assessment. I generally like Murray, but just thought his arguments were made worthless by himself.
I love Helen as do we all but there’s nothing wrong with sorting kids by talents and preferences. We’re all different and it takes all kinds to make the world go round. It was a common carpenter who changed the world.
Maybe the issue is by labeling it by “talent”. Some people want books in their hands and some want books. Both are “talents” we need in this world.
It seems to be a cookie-cutter world we live in, and all the shapes are in the form of "College." We're losing out on a lot because of that.
We've over-corrected on higher education, for sure. I'm 100% sure.
Intelligence is far and away the most useful and productive talent.
Why do I have a feeling you’re a “race and IQ” guy?
See this is what I mean. Where did I say that only reading books was talent? If I could make as much money working construction, I would.
Ok dude. You really can't keep it metaphorical anymore?
I’m covered in child puke and this podcast comment section is my place to be funny.
ok ok. You're a good dude and I'm jumpy.
It’s okay, I just have a lot of pears on me
Students who are highly academically advanced compared to their peers can feel bored and excluded by the material in standard curricula. Bright students often want to be challenged. If you want to engage those students and get them excited about class, there needs to be some mechanism to give them material and instruction that is appropriate to their level.
It’s also just frustrating to be around a lot of people who couldn’t give a shit about what they are supposed to be learning and disrupt class instead of working.
I think instead of making “gifted and talented” classes they should go back to adding more skills- and career- based training. Do automotive, electronics, arts, or computer programming tracks for kids who Aren’t academically inclined and just want to build stuff and get jobs straight out of school instead of forcing them to take Algebra 2 and making life miserable for kids who want to learn
Everyone would be happier. If I could make as much money working construction as I do sending emails, I would be swinging a hammer.