I know people who listen to the pod are usually interested in in-depth academic deep dives into who is p-hacking what, but please indulge a little bit of gossip.

I have no idea who this guy is, but he has made a short video about Bret Weinstein being blocked on Twitter by Elon Musk. The best part is how Weinstein had lobbied Elon Musk against removing the block feature, explaining that it is a necessary part of his Twitter experience, only to cry foul when he himself was blocked by Musk for spamming him and whining non-stop about how this is censorship and ruins his Twitter experience.

Anyway, looks like there may be some more fun videos on similar topics here, but I don't know anything about this You Tuber....

Hey everyone, I'm not sure if this is appropriate to ask but considering how this sub has been critical of Bret Weinstein multiple times, I figured I would get the best answer here.

Back around 2017, I first heard of Weinstein during his Evergreen State College controversy (which I suspect is when most first heard about him) where he spoke out against some of the College's policies that were singling out and excluding white students and staff. This led to a lot of protests against him and eventually his resignation, but also led to national coverage which I believe favored Weinstein's side. He completely dropped off my radar afterwards and the next time I heard about him was during the pandemic, when he was spreading a bunch of anti-vaccine misinformation and other conspiracy theories.

Now back in 2017, I definitely was on Weinstein's side (which is partially why I was so shocked when I heard about him again during the pandemic), but I was also slightly leaning into the whole "anti-SJW" and "anti-political correctness" schtick that was rampant at the time. However even now, it's hard to look back on those events and say that Weinstein was at fault.

So my question is this: Was Weinstein at fault for anything during the Evergreen controversy, or is this a case we've seen multiple time where someone "good" started grifting once they realized how much money they could make?

Edit: Thank you everyone for responding! From what I can tell, the general consensus seems to be that Weinstein was a “broken clock”, or that he was “correct” this one time but has gone downhill ever since. However, a significant amount of people, including those saying they have connections to Evergreen, said that Weinstein at the very least took what should have been a small issue and blew it severely out of proportion. Whether or not he purposefully did this to gain a national audience and start “grifting” is up for interpretation, but it does look very similar to what Jordan Peterson did with Bill C-16.

Doc Wilson granting Bret's wishes and gathers relevant experts to show him evidence of how and why he is wrong. Will Bret keep his word and own it? Not holding my breath lol

"Huge thanks to for the "emergency podcast" on , with me and . The censorship campaign obscuring Ivermectin (as prophylactic against SARS-CoV2 and as treatment for COVID-19) kills. Is it about shareholders and EUAs?"

I watch Bret and Heather's podcast quite regularly. I appreciate them as two well-educated, intelligent and skeptical people who rejected the new encroaching ideology, and had the integrity of speaking up against it. I value their past experience as researchers and teachers, owing to which they can intelligently discuss the unwelcome changes in the academia.

But every so often, I encounter what annoys me the most about Bret. He keeps presenting himself as a scientist, even though he hasn't done any actual science in ages. He speaks of a "toolkit" that he has acquired through his training in science in general, and evolutionary biology in particular, which presumably allows him to "detect patterns" and analyze research, without needing to have sufficient in-depth knowledge in the relevant fields. That his "toolkit", if there ever was one, is woefully inadequate to the task could be seen from the mistakes he made over the covid years. You might remember him improvising ad-hoc masks from bandannas in the early episodes of DarkHorse; or how he and Heather the New York Times for starting to suggest that masks were beneficial, because "wasn't it obvious from the beginning?" — all that without properly researching any prior literature on masks for respiratory infections such as influenza, which should have sown doubt in their belief (indeed, in the later months they did a 180 from their initial position, and became big mask skeptics). You may also remember how easily Bret fell for ivermectin, insisting that it was "100% effective" as a preventive measure, basing this judgement on the Argentinian study by Carvalho et al., which was later found to be almost certainly a scientific malpractice.

Bret is curiously prone to sensationalism. One famous example of that was the title of his first ivermetin episode, "How to save the world in three easy steps". A recent example, discussed in the , was when Bret suggested that the reason for covid vaccine mandates in the US army was because a nefarious foreign power was acting through the corrupt US legislators with a goal to undermine battle readiness of the US armed forces. Whatever toolkit he is using that produces such conclusions, it is clearly missing the mark.

Why am I writing this now? Because I just saw Bret's at the round table held by Ron DeSantis, in which he 1) insisted that his background in evolutionary biology gives him the "right toolkit for wrestling the big picture into clarity", and 2) claims that "poor decision-making in the very beginning of covid ... not treating it with the best tools at our disposal led us to a situation where we effectively ran out the clock on the very brief period of time in which we might have driven the virus to extinction", although there is zero evidence that "driving SARS-CoV-2 to extinction", his favorite phrase, was ever a possibility.

To summarize, I like Bret and Heather in their role of scientific commentators — even though, as scientific commentators, they clearly failed in not engaging any orthodox scientists into in-depth discussions — but it seems that this role is too narrow for Bret. He positions himself as an expert (in which capacity he was sitting on DeSantis's panel) on topics in which he is not.

What’s on you ask? , , , , , , , , , , , , @MikeNaynac and me, for starters, just off the top of my head.

It seems like all of these people like Trump more than Biden. I'm not sure under what circumstances you could be said to be on the left if that is your viewpoint. Greenwald is a Cato Institute guy. Rogan has said he is libertarian.

ETA: I see Chris saw the tweet already

Source:

What's up with Peterson? He seemed like he was honest person when I watched him debating Harris, but here he is just being irresponsible:

Edit: Full quote "I suspect if you did the statistics properly, I suspect that medicine independent of public health kills more people than it saves. I suspect that if you factor in phenomena like development of superbugs in hospitals for example. That overall, the net consequence of hospitals is negative. That's just a guess. That could easily be wrong. But it could also not be wrong".

Do people truly take these guys seriously as public intellectuals? They both characterize this aggrieved stereotype that individuals with an utter lack of accomplishments often have. Every interview I see with either of them involves them essentially complaining about how their brilliance has been rejected by the academic world. Yet people seem to listen to these guys and view them as intellectuals.

• Eric’s claim to fame is his still-as-of-yet-unpublished supposed unifying theory of physics. There are literally countless journals out there, and if he was serious he would publish in one of them (even if it’s a not prestigious). He criticizes academia sometimes with valid points (academia is indeed flawed in its current state), however his anger at the academic physics world for refusing to just accept his unpublished theories as the brilliance they supposedly are is just absurd. He also coined the infamous term “intellectual dark web”, because if you want to prove how right your ideas are you should borrow a phrase that describes a place where you can hire a hitman or purchase a child prostitute.

• Bret’s only real claim to fame is that, he stood his ground (for reasons which I view as incredibly tactless but not inherently incorrect) during a time of social upheaval in his institution. This echoes the unfortunate rise of Jordan Peterson, who launched his own career as a charlatan self-help guru off the back of a transgender pronoun argument. But like Peterson, Bret really doesn’t have anything useful or correct to say in this spotlight. Yes he has some occasionally correct critiques of academia (just like Eric), but these correct critiques are born out of this entitled aggrieved “my theory was rejected” place. He also has said some just absolutely crazy shit. Bret—an evolutionary biologist and not a molecular biologist or virologist—went on Joe Rogan and talked about the “lab leak” SARS-CoV-2 virus hypothesis/conspiracy theory, despite literally every other expert in the field saying this is hogwash. His comments about supposed election fraud were also just wrong. Edit: To the people in June 2021 who keep posting “LOL THIS AGED BADLY”, serious scientists still don’t advocate the lab leak hypothesis. There is more mainstream acknowledgement that it is a possibility (it isn’t logically impossible) which should be investigated, but scientists are a far cry from Bret’s bullshit claim of “I looked at the genetic code and I know for a fact this is a lab leak”. Additionally, now Bret is peddling conspiracy theories about the mRNA COVID vaccines being dangerous.

I have always been sad that Sam Harris the intellectual atheist neuroscientist mutated into Sam Harris: Culture Warrior™ after he got called a racist by Ben Affleck on live television, and has since then often sought refuge among these aggrieved IDW folks who one by one have been revealed as hacks, alt-right goons, or charlatans. Sam seems to have had a moment of clarity in 2021, and I hope he stays on his current path (one which doesn’t involve so many arguments about transgender people, or doesn’t involve social racial issues which he clearly doesn’t understand well).

So yeah, why do people listen to these guys? What is wrong in our discourse that we have so many hack “intellectuals” in our society?