Click on the PDF to see the updated study.

As a nurse, public health fan, not to mention parent with a young kid... this is not great.

I'm gonna lose my shit if I start seeing hospital admissions for polio, measles, and pertussis.

When we started The Know Rogan Experience, I didn’t realise there was already an episode where Joe and his guest talked about me! Bit of a surprise to find it today.

Here’s Will Storr in 2024 misrepresenting a conversation I had with him in 2010. Will came along to cover QED conference and our 10:23 homeopathy overdose for the Telegraph and for his book.

Annoyingly, he made stuff up about our conversation in the book. And 15 years later he’s still misrepresenting it in interviews!

https://youtu.be/8Ct-q6sJOOY?t=9067

It’s a mix of pseudoscience, misinformation, and pure arrogance.

If you’ve got 4 mins to waste and a report button to spare, do your thing.

https://youtu.be/o69BiOqY1Ec?si=pmaY93gnd2XcQTcI

Did anybody watch this because for me, it was difficult to sit through. This is why we don't "debate" anti science quacks unless it's for fun.

He was way too soft and wanted to be "nice". They steamrolled him. It was one long gish-gallop and he was basically impotent.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/201808/science-stopped-believing-in-porn-addiction-you-should-toon

What is Vox even doing publishing this crap? Astrology is very clearly not evidence-based. Has Vox lost its way? I thought it was pretty trustworthy, but am I mistaken?

“A skeptic saying, ‘I don’t believe in astrology,’ is like someone saying, ‘I don’t believe in maps,’ or, ‘I don’t believe in instruction manuals.’ Whether or not you choose to engage with it means nothing,” Register says. “You can go through life just fine without maps or instruction manuals and figure it all out yourself, but those tools can make things way easier on you.”

As the zodiac tells us, people are different, and need different things. Register’s argument might be convincing enough for some, and it won’t be enough for others. Especially if you’re a Capricorn.

If a "skeptical" counter-explanation to some claim is demonstrably wrong, people who are more on the fence about the claim may start to lean somewhat more in the acceptation of those claims.

There's a valid argument that even very "basic" default skepticism is generally preferable, as it's "erring toward realistic possibilities," based on what's known to be real, or more likely real, compared to the "open mindedness" toward the extraordinary or not established as real. Right most of the time, versus only extremely exceptionally not totally wrong.

Arguably a skeptical argument countering a claim should itself be expressed with some uncertainty."It's far more likely this comparatively banal explanation, or maybe this other relatively trivial thing, or maybe even this rare thing but known to actually exist." Versus something that leans more boldly into one specific possibility that's not specifically confirmed on that instance. To state that trivial thing ABC only "may be" the explanation is not implicitly suggesting that utterly unfounded hypothesis XYZ is even tenable. Even "no particular alternative explanation comes to mind right now, but XYZ is extremely unlikely regardless," can be preferable in some cases, ideally followed by "standard" known problems for XYZ to be considered real.

One example of an instance I think went poorly was of a skeptic countering that a deformed skull was one of an human-alien hybrid by saying it was one of a gorilla. It was definitely not one of a gorilla, which just don't have hydrocephalic-like larger vaults. What may look like a big vault on the gorilla's head is actually partly from the angle and a bony "keel" for muscle attachments, the vault itself is rather small. Human hydrocephaly, even artificial reshaping, or even adulteration happen to be better alternatives than "gorilla skull," which ends up being a point in favor of the one defending it's "alien hybrid" for part of the audience, even if in making it seem like the skeptic is just rationalizing a conclusion made in advance, rather than something more positively in favor of the "aliens" proponent.

Besides that, we have a propensity towards some degree of "strawmanning" in mocking/parodying certain claims. While this is potentially too funny to be altogether avoided, perhaps it should also be sometimes followed with some sincere "steel-manning" of the claims we're addressing.

Doing it shows a more thought-through process, harder to be taken by those "on the fence" as an acritical reliance on canned explanations, group-thinking, which can be the result in cases when a "skeptic" counter-argument happens to be demonstrably wrong, despite being inherently more parsimonious than the claims being made on the other side.

The steel-manning itself may in some cases end up not being something that really strengthens the extraordinary claims, but rather highlights its "unlikelihood," by stressing on several assumptions that must be held in order for the claim to possibly be "true," but that are most likely overlooked by the actual proponents.

It may end up being more like an exhaustive parody covering highly specific details in a way, depending on what the claim is, and what would be necessary for it to possibly be true. So even the humor of the straw-man parody is not necessarily lost, although it changes from something like "this is not another ZAZ-wannabe spoof movie" to something more like "Monty Python," or whatever are one' preferred examples of sources of dumb jokes and more elaborate ones.

According to the Tartaria conspiracy theory, an ancient civilisation built the Chrysler Building before dying off in a great flood

He's stated (but had to formally retract his statement) that people should check the toilet paper in public bathrooms because it's possible to transmit HIV.

Or suggesting that people should stop making their bed for at least 30-60min in the morning because mites thrive on moisture and making your bed helps them reproduce.

I also looked into his claim about 211 cases being examined about the effects of people on minoxidil who interact with their pets by "Tater & Colleagues" which I could not find anywhere.

He never links his sources and often makes wildly outrageous claims that give me that fearmongering grifter vibe.

I see and hear people say this about their families fairly frequently. Mostly on the internet, but also a couple of times in person. Was it really that widespread? Don't get me wrong, I believe that the people making the claim believe it's true, and I believe that many of them would be true, but I also can't help but feel it's probably not in many cases. To me, it smacks of guilt and cope. Thoughts?