Joe Rogan and Michael Shellenburger on the current problems in science and society
2024-10-11 11:00:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
cat << EOF
I thought this was a particularly insightful back and forth following a discussion about science and specifically the efficacy of vaccines [0:37:05]:
Shellenburger: It’s very authoritarian. [...] What Fouchey and Peter Hotez and Bill Neigh call "science" is not actually science, because science is a process. The way they talk about it, is more like a doctrine, or a dictatorship. In a dictatorship science is done by scientists. Well actually science can be done by anybody. It’s like journalism. You don’t need a PHD to do science. Science is something that you do, and it’s also not the same, sometimes you do experiments in labs, but science in the world of ecological biology is just going out there and counting the number or gorillas or whales. So when they say "science" they really mean "obey me". That’s what they mean.
Rogan: And it’s people that are connected to institutions. All of them.
Shellenburger: Very powerful ones.
Rogan: So you are connected to educational institutions, you are connected to these pharmaceutical industries, various institutions that are funding media. So they have enormous influence and power over narratives. And then you have people like Bill Niegh who’s not even a scientist.
Shellenburger: I know, he’s an engineer.
Rogan: Which is really wild. A guy that’s not a scientist, is "the science guy". [...] There’s a scientific method, and that’s what science is. Science is applying the scientific method and data and trying to find out the truth, based on what we know. It’s not "trust the experts". Especially when the experts are severely compromised.
Shellenburger: Science comes out of Christianity. It comes out of the desire to understand god’s creation. Then over time the church gives more and more freedom to these scientists to study things, that end up being quite inconvenient. The earth revolves around the sun or there’s evolution, there’s all these things that scientists discover. It’s the opposite of doctrine. They are discovering things that are content doctrinaire [...] Science tries to tell you how things are, not what you should do.
It’s worth going back a bit and listening to the path they took, the I think pretty well thought out criticism they make, to get to their summation. They go on to talk about some of the issues current day institutions are running into. And also what will be likely seen as a rather controvercial chat about drug legalisation / decriminalisation, but I think they make some very good observations.
Really interesting discussion.