Friday, 28 January 2022

Popular Doesn't Mean Having Any Precision?

Spotify pay $100m for the exclusive rights to Joe Rogan's podcast. Rogan's podcast, having more then 380m users, tops the charts in Australia, the UK and the USA. This podcast, however, has carried some highly contentious material. Contentious often equates with attention-grabbing. It's a commonly used device to inflate 'readership'. First we had the story that veteran rocker, Neil Young, wanted his tracks removed from Spotify, because he disapproved of antivaxx material featuring prominently on the Rogan podcast. Young told Spotify they couldn't have both Rogan and Young. Now, we have the world's climate scientists, collectively flabbergasted by Rogans's extended discussion with Canadian (another one!) Psychologist, Jordan Peterson (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/27/word-salad-of-nonsense-scientists-denounce-jordan-petersons-comments-on-climate-models). Peterson claimed that all climate science models were useless, as errors increase with time (climate change occurs over decades and longer). As the climate scientists point out, Peterson has made the basic error of confusing climate and weather. Weather predictions do become less accurate with time. Climate science, however, has a completely different basis. It incorporates fixed, measurable entities like the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The really worrying aspect, is that Rogan seems more than happy to push false information, likely to cause humans to behave in inappropriate ways (e.g. not getting vaccinated and ignoring climate change). This is a 'Facebook'-style treatment of what should be serious issues. It's not even a level 'playing field', as there are astronomically different levels of exposure for the podcast and the science in this English-speaking world!

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