Because gosh forbid that straight white dudes ever get sex advice or insight from anyone who isn’t another straight white dude.
10 Likes
Probably.
9 Likes
Adam Carolla is a weird one as sort of the Joe Rogan before Joe Rogan to the point that Joe Rogan replaced him on The Man Show. I guess since the Intellectual Darkweb is starting to fall apart that means Rogan will be a regular on Carlson in 4-5 years and shift towards more “common sense” politics - assuming their careers continue to track together.
5 Likes
Straight white dudes is a demographic that votes for the worst president in history just because he is a straight white dude. They ain’t bright that way.
5 Likes
I’m just saying that even a straight white dude would learn a lot more from—and maybe even be more likely to listen to—a sex advice show that included a host who was in possession of a vagina.
11 Likes
Dr. Ruth was always a blast to listen to. So enthusiastic and warm and funny.
21 Likes
Dr. Who? Never heard of him until just now.
1 Like
This analogy is spot-on. Carola was the proto-Rogan, and dudes like them, Drew, Dawkins, Hitchens, Jordan Peterson, Geraldo, Tucker, etc have gone on to form this faux-intellectual movement of angry, sexist, racist white dudes going on about things they have zero experience or expertise with. But they’re “just asking questions” so they attract a lot of naive mainstream attention from people who don’t know their shtick. I’ve watched otherwise-woke male coworkers get radicalized in front of me from listening to these clowns. I see that Jared Diamond is also now getting sucked into it. His writing has been getting increasingly racist.
15 Likes
I’m not a huge fan, but, to be fair, he did issue an unequivocal apology along with more accurate information on April 4, the day after the CDC and WHO clarified their stances on face coverings. Yeah, it sucks that he publicly got it wrong at first, but he did do the right thing.
One of the things we’re told to look for in a reputable news outlet is one that issues corrections for earlier posts.
6 Likes
Since when do the face eating leopards have an undo button?
I’m pretty much convinced at this point that anybody who goes professionally by “Dr. <firstname>” is going to end up being a quack.
6 Likes
Now, why on earth shouldn’t I trust my local media doc?
Heck, I would rather seek a consult with this guy…
Thank you Steve Ditko!
4 Likes
This is super weird to me. Everyone I know with any significant medical training is being super reserved about what Covid can and can’t do (because you know, new disease, and we really don’t have anywhere near full knowledge on it yet). They’re all almost obsessively screening the literature on COVID as soon as it comes out as well. This is not just human Drs, but the folks I know who are nurse practitioners, other veterinarians, etc…
But… this guy is a human Dr, and doesn’t seem to have knowledge that’s pretty widely available in the literature. I have to imagine that he’s not keeping up to date on the biggest medical topic in existence, which is just mind boggling (even if you only consider his background, and self interest; not even considering that he’s a somewhat public figure that is at least theoretically known as a Dr…)
13 Likes
I know…the governor of the state of Baja California is purported to be ill a second time (because he’s a fool), and my local doctor is just shaking her head because so many people won’t heed her advice yet still want to be fixed up if they catch it. And she only makes about USD $25/day for her efforts, plus working at the general hospital to pay off her degree.
17 Likes
This has been so evergreen.
24 Likes
To be fair, I think his big introduction to most people, Guns Germs and Steel had some problems to begin with. I think he’s always been there.
https://savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropologys-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/
Same with Pinker’s Better Angels book. Both are just more warmed over Eurocentric bullshit.
14 Likes
Agreed, that book was basically “yay colonialism!”.
Other big name books to come from this crowd are Rare Earth and The Skeptical Environmentalist. Both pseudo-intellectual dumpster fires that sound sciencey enough to draw people in. I say this as someone who got taken in by both those books in my younger years, before I learned how to check sources and consider the agenda of an author. For anyone who hasn’t read them, the former is creationism propaganda and the latter is neocon anti-environmentalist propaganda. Don’t even get me started on Malcolm “I see correlations and invent statistics” Gladwell.
12 Likes
Malcolm Gladwell is a particular offender on the point of not checking his sources. A lot of claims in Outliers don’t checkout if you actually read through the bibliography and look up the studies. Nearly all of them are really underpowered and finding really tiny effect sizes. Essentially P-hacked findings a lot of the time. And occasionally he’ll cite a paper as supporting what he’s claiming when it literally says the opposite.
It’s almost like he’s leaning heavily on paywalls making his research inaccessible for review. And I don’t know who the heck his editors are, but they’re all paid too much.
11 Likes
He also literally just makes stuff up. He has said as much himself. An interviewer asked him where he got that “10000 hours” number for expertise and he said he made it up as a rhetorical device to make his point about how he thinks the world works. But the entire book is written in sciencey language as though that number is empirical and he goes on to derive conclusions from that number- which he just made up. He described himself as “not a science writer” but goes out of his way to sound like he’s speaking scientifically. Freakonomics is basically entirely correlations that he built into pet theories and then presented as science.
The Skeptical Environmentalist (different author) was so egregious that Scientific American devoted an entire issue of the magazine to debunking it point by point.
13 Likes
The Farce is strong with this one.
1 Like
