Weinstein repeated discredited theories to Rogan about HIV not being the cause of AIDS, alarming and infuriating public health experts.
Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biology professor turned podcaster and ivermectin guy, repeated a series of discredited pseudo-theories about AIDS in a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Weinstein, a frequent guest, told Rogan that he found the theory that party drugs like poppers cause AIDS to be “surprisingly compelling.” (It is not.) Weinstein also told Rogan he came to these ideas by reading a recent book by anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, creating a sort of unholy turducken of misinformation passed onto an audience of millions.
Why is an evolutionary biologist qualified to even talk about this, he’s not exactly a medical expert.
I’m a biologist, during my graduation I had an entire 8 month virology class, with a module dedicated to HIV. Viruses and how HIV works also appeared in physiology, microbiology, farmacology and I believe cell morphology. The professor who taught me virology is one of my country’s leading experts and the most cited expert in his area - this person only decided to teach the bio students (he is a biologist himself) so the med students didn’t get to learn from the main expert in the building.
Should a biologist provide somebody with an HIV infection diagnosis? No. Could a biologist recommend some sort of treatment or medication? No. Should a biologist instruct somebody to go against the recommendations of their doctor? No. Where I live, any of that would be illegal in fact, and no trained biologist would disagree.
But biologists are absolutely capable of talking about HIV, how it works, how it spreads, and are indeed commonly the ones actually doing research into the virus and treatments.
Your comment would be like saying “this physicist isn’t qualified to talk about gravity though. He’s not even an engineer!”
(though yes, the mere suggestion that HIV comes from party drugs is moronic)
I mean, are there many people who can talk about gravity?
I mean, he made an idiotic comment that goes against the entirety of what we know about hiv and aids. Biologist or not, he’s using an appeal to authority to spread misinformation.
Sure, I agree. But that’s not what your comment said. Your comment specifically questioned why a biologist would talk about HIV and not a medical expert.
And I stand by that comment. An evolutionary biologist has no business commenting on something he’s not an expert in.
So yes - my comment perfectly applies. If you believe a biologist has no business commenting on HIV, you don’t really understand what a biologist does or studies.
Do you hold multiple PhDs in computer science? No? Log off.
Actually, I don’t know it. I haven’t studied medicine or aids.
I doubt that most of the other people here have either.
We’re just repeating what we hear.
You can literally google it.
That would be the “repeating what we hear” to which I referred
I actually took classes from Bret Weinstein, and knew him semi-personally outside the unversity.
He is a pompous ass who really feels he has the keys to understanding and analyzing all topics.
It was good for facilitating evolutionary biology discussons and seminars. It was terrible for everything else.
I recommended he needed a sabbatical after my classes, and in 2 years he was chased off campus with baseball bats.
My dad was a professor (in the humanities). So many of his colleagues thought that they knew everything about everything because they got a PhD on 13th century Lithuanian poetry or whatever. It really turned me off of academia growing up and seeing them all act like that.
Oh Bret had a whole rant about the humanities without a single drip of irony. I remember he handwaved the entire study of ecology in a seminar as “postmodernism.”
He was my last class at TESC and he made me feel far more over it than I needed to be.
Biologist or not I want to know why a stupid person is qualified to talk about this. Fuck all these woowoo magic-thinking lunatic assholes.