Adventures with a “debate me bro”

If you didn’t know this about me, I grew up with a lawyer for a mother. From a very early age, I got used to listening to her argue — and many times win — some very tough arguments. As a defense lawyer in Mexico, she defended the indefensible, and she stood up to some powerful me. Those experiences with her allowed me to understand the nuances of a good debate. Mainly, if you stick to the facts, there’s no room for more debate. Either there is evidence for what you’re claiming, or there is not. Or, if there is evidence, the evidence is flawed and your conclusions are confounded.

I think I chose to become an epidemiologist because of the neat line that separates evidence and opinion. Yeah, the flu is bad. I hate feeling tired, sick, and feverish. But the true measure of its severity is the risk it poses to me of sending me to the hospital or killing me. And, for me to know that risk truthfully, I have to look at a lot of data. The data will tell me the risk of bad outcomes from the flu. And it’s in those data and evidence that I’ve concluded to get the flu vaccine each year, and to have my daughter vaccinated against influenza as well.

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that I don’t make decisions from the gut. I do. I’m only human, after all. But then I catch myself being unreasonable or illogical, and I go back to the arms of reason. Again, the facts are the facts, and they will help me win any argument. Insults and threats are better left for lesser minds… Or younger ones.

Have you heard lately of the “debate me bros”? They’re the self-proclaimed “intellectuals” and “influencers” online who bait someone into an argument, record themselves going around in illogical circles, and then monetize all of it for profit. In many cases, these debates are not even debates in the classical sense. They’re just a pair (or more) of people yelling at each other. Instead of agreeing to change their minds given the new data they’ve encountered in their exchange of ideas, they end up more isolated and divided.

The whole thing has gotten stupid:

I recently had the displeasure of meeting a “debate bro.” The man is a multi-millionnaire who became vocal about his anti-vaccine stance in the last few years. I wrote a blog post on Medium about his incomplete data analysis of COVID-19 data from California, and he… Well, he appears to have had an allergic reaction.

First, he showed up in the comments section of the blog post:

The thing is… I wasn’t trying to fool anyone. All I did was point out that in his analysis of a data set with about 118,000 records, he was only analyzing about 83,000. The rest? Well, he was doing the analysis on Microsoft Excel, using a pivot table. When doing that, the pivot table doesn’t count the records with missing data. So all of those 34,000 or so records were missing data. You need to figure out what is going on when almost 30% of your data are missing your variable of interest.

The funny part is that I didn’t say he was right or wrong in his analysis. If anything, my missing data analysis using R Studio actually gave him an out for his stance that the COVID-19 vaccine made you more likely to get sick. (It doesn’t.) But I guess he didn’t read the blog post, or didn’t want to read it. Because he then texted me:

Yes, that was at 11:46 PM Eastern. He apparently lives in California, so I guess he thought text messaging someone at 9:46 PM was a normal thing to do?

When I didn’t reply to either his comment or his text message, he proceeded to email me at work. Yes, at work.

And when I did not reply, well… Let’s just say his comments call me a “cockroach” and his sycophants on Twitter claim victory over me because I won’t debate him.

LOL, as the kids say.

Apparently, this is par for the course for this guy. Check these out:

• In which he wants to debate a physician
• In which he wants to debate scientists
• In which he promotes weird anti-vaccine ideas, apparently
• In which he became a misinformation superspreader, apparently
• In which he is spreading misinformation on vaccines and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, apparently
• In which he apparently gave cash to lawyers to fight pharmaceutical companies and others over vaccination

In other words, he has “eff you” money, and seems to like to wave it around. Unfortunately for him, I can’t be bought. I can’t be baited into a debate over truth. Threats don’t work on me. I’ve been held at gunpoint, and beaten up by a group of guys in Mexico City.

Still, I did not break.

I grew up in the “perfect dictatorship” in Mexico, with family members who were dissidents and suffered the consequences. And this old white man with cash is not an exception. He and I will never debate anything live because I’m not a debater. I’m a scientist. I’m an epidemiologist.

I am the Epi Ren. I’ve dealt with people who claim to have millions of dollars and use that — and only that — as their evidence for being right.

He can write whatever he wants about me, or about the things I write, and I will not debate him. Scientific facts are not settled in debates. They’re settled in discourse and discovery of new data and evidence. Just because you get the most clicks or the most applause does not mean you’re correct. Heck, I’d be skeptical of you if you were doing things for the clicks.

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Thank you for reading. Please check out more of my thoughts over on my Medium.com blog at: https://medium.com/@epiren

Or listen to my ramblings on the Epidemiological Podcast: https://anchor.fm/rene-najera

Stalk me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renenajera/

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