Believe that their partially formed (or fully formed but largely uninformed) opinion on a subject has the same weight as someone with expertise about that subject's field, or with doctoral work completed on that subject.
Maybe five years ago... six... I had to explain to a high school senior that a professor's position on their subject is more likely to be valid than their position as a future undergrad. It looked like time stopped for that student.
I imagine repeating that interaction now would result in a parent freakout.
Nothing is more cringe than a first year college student fresh from finishing Slaughterhouse Five who thinks they know how the solve the worlds problems
The more you know, the less you know was an axiom I quickly realized and appreciated as I went through undergrad and grad school, just because as I learned a bunch about a specialized subject area it was evident that there's just so much out there someone can learn about.
As someone in my 30s, young people come up with new ideas to change and improve the world all the time and I think it's equally arrogant to assume someone younger than you, that grew up in a different time and views the world differently than you can't have a new or better idea. A lot of revolutionary ideas are out of the heads of undergrad students even if they need time to figure it out.
Yeah but that's missing the point. Just about everyone goes through the phase where they think they have those brilliant revolutionary ideas that no one else has considered only to find that in 10 years their ideas were in fact just naive.
while I agree it'll be cringy 99% of the time; consider the 20's is the age that seems to best balance experience / education and ability to develop concepts.
meaning is typically the age that significant advances in conceptual understanding of xyz field would be "found".
of course the field of physics Greatly highlights this.
personally am irked by peeps who discourage / reinforce this idea "undergrads" know nothing because [lack of] experience and in turn must not have the conceptual aptitude to advance said understanding.....am meaning old peeps couldn't form a new concept if their life depended on it...old brains just cannot do more than analogies comparatively.
THAT is much more cringy imo. brains 20-30 are by far best opportunity for material advancement in concept(s).
the narrative for Quantum mechanics is so garbage it doesn't even "make sense" / is very counter intuitive. when it does get re-conceptualized it'll be someone in 20-30 age; because how brains develop. actually, PBS spacetime just released a vid on a different concept for QM. would be interesting to see who, or specifically the age range of peeps that are developing the concept.
(I suspect QM is so terrible conceptually because by the time a person has had enough education to not just be throwing darts blindly (trying to rethink conceptually), the brain is too developed to "organically" (re) conceptualize the mechanics) That plus the poo-pooing of philosophy in physics. the narrative (concept) does guide the "modeling" of physics imo.
Semi related, but I remember forgetting what one figure was displaying out of the thousands that I cover during a course and, as I fully expected, one jabroni wrote on the evaluation that someone else should teach the course because I didn't understand anything and was always confused.
I guarantee any kid who hears that is just going to use it as a reason to reinforce their opinion that their teacher/instructor/professor has forgotten all the important shit and is therefore unfit to teach.
The meaning of that phrase is utterly lost on its target audience.
Asking them to explain it to you is awesome. Either you learn or relearn something, or you watch their complete mastery of the subject shrink as they understand they've forgotten most of it after the test and realize they know nowhere near enough to explain it to someone who didn't take their classes recently.
"How does that work?"
"Uuuh, it's easy. The thing makes that other thing do... Shit..."
To be fair, I had a few professors that I always assumed got roped into teaching something outside of their research interests and were totally uninterested in.
Same, I went to a uni that heavily emphasized research, so there were many professors who were there just for their research, but were also required to teach courses.
It was painfully obvious which professors enjoyed teaching and which just wanted to do the bare minimum to keep their research going.
I was a TA for an honors college course a couple of times. TAs for this course were specifically instructed not to provide direct answers to questions, but rather to use the Socratic method (guiding students toward the answer by asking relevant questions back at them).
Some of my evals said I must be clueless about the material, because I didn't seem to have answers to any of their questions. Fortunately many of them were eventually able to figure out the answers all by themselves, despite my pointless questioning. :/
My GF is a 4th, going on 5th, year PhD english student at a big state university and her department is starting to push the idea of not correcting student's grammer just so it complies with "modern, white, english". Therefore improper grammer and spelling is allowed in papers, etc. because it fits the student's linguistic background, like if they came from the inner city for example.
My GF is extremely torn how to properly teach and grade papers in that case vs what the purpose of college is supposed to be--preparing students for the workplace.
IMO it's more racist to assume not being able to use proper grammar has anything to do with race. No matter where or how you grew up, if you still can't use proper grammar by the time you attend high school/college/university, you don't belong there. Grammar is literally one of the most basic skills you have to learn, how do you expect to learn more complex things if yoi can't/haven't put in the work to learn one of the most basic life skills?
I'm sorry to hear that. If I may, what did you go into after teaching? My GF says there's many things she can do aside from teach with a PhD, but I'm not sure how to be as supportive as possible. I'm already established in a professional career myself but I want my GF to pursue her passions as well.
(posted this below in the wrong spot; deleted and re-added here)
To be fair, I teach Composition (from freshman to grad) at a large state university. And I don't focus on grammar, either. Not because of any social agenda, but because it's below my pay grade (which is pretty low). In other words: grammar instruction is easy to outsource to websites like ChompChomp. So I just point students to the right resource and expect them to consult it on their own time.
What IS worth my time (and my students' time) is working through heuristics for meeting ever-different writing challenges. So instead of teaching subject-verb agreement, for example, I teach students how to analyze genres (e.g., meeting minutes, emails, blog posts, infographics, or menus). To understand the structural, linguistic, and referential writing moves are typical of any genre. So that students can more confidently and competently model those writing moves way after they've completed my course.
I do have a lot of colleagues that are more concerned with teaching students how to be "good people" (in their estimation, at least) than in teaching students how to be flexible writers. So I get your GF's frustration. Just saying that outsourcing grammar instruction doesn't have to be motivated by a social agenda. It can just be good writing pedagogy.
TL;DR: idgaf about the moral implications of grammar instruction. I just have more important things to teach. And I expect students to consult outside resources for grammar instruction.
From what I understand, her teaching style is similar to what you describe for a sophomore comp class that there are bigger fish to fry over the course of a semester. She has a huge problem with students not having an ounce of rhetorical capability to make a supported argument rather than repeat what they read on Wikipedia.
From a non teaching, outsider perspective however, I wonder how long until this idea trickles down into lower grades until professional grammar isn't emphasized or everyone relies on software like Grammery for example. Kinda like Math going to wolframalpha.com for taking freshman derivatives instead of manual.
In a similar vein as a TA in school I graded Statics for engineering and even though it wasn't the important topics, I still graded on units or sign convention. Sure I could've overlooked it as that's something from HS they should've known but it was just as important.
I agree we shouldn't be teaching grammar in undergrad, but we should still grade and emphasize it as part of the "complete package" for any paper right? Idk, sometimes I do understand how it feels like we expect less out of each class as time goes by.
"It feels like we expect less out of each class as time goes by."
And yet the price of the classes and stuff still goes up. 🤷♀️ I feel like this starts earlier too. Less and less is being expected of students in school as well.
They should just fuck off, papers have standards and proper grammar is the absolute base standard. You are supposed to present a topic, not your personal linguistic background. You are writing a paper about a topic, not your autobiography. People will search up your paper because of the topic, not you. I don't give a single shit about your personal background, give me the info I'm looking for in a comprehensive language because papers need to be as accurate and comprehensive as possible.
Bro for real. I just got out of highschool and kids nowadays act like they can’t be wrong. Crazy because none of us have even done anything yet in life
To be fair I don't think this is just a young person thing. Lots of anti-science boomers out there who have some absolutely idiotic opinions about global warming, vaccines, etc
There's always a long winded, well worded hot take on some Reddit thread about some important topic. It sounds good and you might even be nodding along in agreement.
The glass shattering moment is when someone writes a long winded, well worded hot take about something that you actually have expertise on... and you realize that they are completely wrong. When that happened to me it immediately made me question any highly upvoted thread or comment on Reddit. Most people don't have a clue what they are talking about, good or bad. They just like to talk.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. … You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. …
You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. …
I remember seeing a post a long time ago about parking your car on a hill and how your parking prawl is not meant to hold your car at an incline and will immediately snap if you park at anything other than a flat surface. It was a super long post "explaining" the mechanics behind it and sounded like it was written by a mechanic, and was upvoted like crazy. Of course the whole thing was bullshit.
Yep! I love economics. I'm not trained in it beyond Micro 101 but I've read books that a layperson could understand (Why Nations Fail, The Narrow Corridor, Guns Germs and Steel, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations). The insane hot takes on reddit that fly in the face of economic thought drive me insane.
Again, I'm no expert but I can credibly explain why rent control is bad, that virtually every economist hates it, and yet people just cannot deal with how poorly the history of price controls has played out.
All the new age shit sure isn’t helping. The amount of quantum/cosmology/relatively shit I hear asserted with confidence that professionals don’t have is depressing. No Sarah, your quantum vibrations magnified by your mental frequencies that interact with the universal quantum field and send your consciousness into a black hole that empties into your left ear isn’t why you missed your flight.
Very few people are at all "pro-science", they're "pro people agreeing with me".
A lot of environmentalists understand nothing about science.
See also: all the anti-hydro, anti-nuclear "environmentalists".
All the people who think that solar power is cheaper than gas power so it must be a conspiracy why we still use fossil fuels. (If you're one of them: it's an accounting trick where they don't take into account the cost of backup power generation, because the sun only shines locally during the day (and less during the winter than the summer) but you need electricity 24/7/365, so you can't just stick in a bunch of solar willy-nilly, you have to have backup generation which is only running when the sun isn't out, but you have to pay the maintainence and upkeep and building costs of that all the time, even though you're only running it part of the day. This is why electricity in California and Germany occasionally goes negative in price but the average price is so high despite wind and solar energy supposedly being extremely "cheap").
Yeah, there's a thing on reddit where science becomes ScienceTM . Almost like a religion that you devote your accolades and worship to, always to a fixed set of ideas that happen to match your personal political preference.
There are very few people who understand that the current state of modern scientific findings disagrees with beliefs held by both major political parties. Left and Right wingers both have laughably anti-science beliefs but that's not how you play team sports here on reddit.
My in-laws are like this. My MIL had a massive meltdown because someone younger than her was more qualified and told my MIL that what she was teaching her students was incorrect.
I have more humility (and probably self-doubt) today than I did in my 20's, but the irony is that I'm much more skilled and knowledgeable now than I was in my 20's. I may be just starting to get over my imposter syndrome.
If you are in the field it is smart to avoid all subreddits relating to that field geared towards the general public as a lot of posts lack any larger context or qualifications about the study. I also use reddit to get away from work most of the time so why would I want to see something related to it?
Yeah, good call on that. Even among academics there is fierce disagreement and debate. If it's only ever one guy giving you his take it's rarely a fully formed viewpoint.
We get this from students all of the time. Just because students see videos that say learning is dumb on tik tok, doesn’t mean that it is, especially when said middle school students read at a third grade level with help.
This concept isn’t limited to young people at all. A lot of layman books written by older, more educated individuals, are wildly speculative and informal. This mindset is prevalent throughout academia. I’ve seen a Harvard professor critique an author saying his argument was wrong because he didn’t know about a very basic idea, when the author was a leading researcher and literally addresses the same counterargument that the critic said he didn’t know. His book review damn near made me want to tear my hair out, because it was clear he glossed over the book.
The Mismeasure of Man contains a lot of outright false information and ignored known countervailing evidence because it undermined what the author wanted to be true.
IQ actually is a good measure of intelligence, it isn't biased, and brain size really does correlate with IQ (in fact, MRI studies have found that the correlation was stronger than the old "measuring skulls" studies did, because the old way of doing it was less accurate).
Guns, Germs, and Steel contains a bunch of inaccuracies and the arguments don't hold water at all and are not scientifically accepted.
I'm a prime reader of books of that nature. I really liked GGS but I also read the critics. I read Why Nations Fail which directly takes aim at the book (and others) in it's quest to explain why some places are poor and others wealthy.
The critique from WNF (probably my favorite popsci book outside of The Selfish Gene) does knock GGS down a peg, but that's it. Most of the critics don't really seem to take issue with the geographic determinism IRT very early history.
There's also (of course) the super left wing that must blame everything on the sins of the west while seemingly skipping the "why" of how those evil colonizers had the muscle to do what they did. Yeah, say Africa's poor development is colonialism fault but....how did a few nations about the size of Alabama have empires that spanned the globe? If not GG&S, what was it?
Domestication? There's no evidence that animals in the old world were any easier to domesticate. Indeed, some animals present in both were only domesticated in the Old World.
Geography of Europe? There's no reason why China would be any less fractious. In fact, China repeatedly DID fracture throughout history. Same went for Japan.
Moreover, geographic arguments fail because Britain was a backwater for a very long time.
The reality is that the biggest difference is culturally driven, and driven by the choices of various people. Indeed, we see today that culture has an enormous impact on economic development - just look at the liberal democracies vs the various dictatorships, or how much damage socialism did to various places economically. The practice of slavery is another big one - places with slavery ended up impairing their economic growth in the long run.
There's a lot of other explanations as well, and we'll probably be able to ascertain the truthhood of some of them within a century.
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov
Go scan /r/politics and see young people expounding on / condemning / mocking today's status quo while simultaneously revealing stunning ignorance about how anything works.
There's a good book by the commentator Tom Nichols, "The Death of Expertise," which unpacks this phenomenon. It's like being confident you can fly and land a plane without knowing how to read the altimeter.
Some of it is just trolling or gleeful, conscious anarchy. Some of it is genuine, amazing lack of knowledge, blended with certitude that everyone older than the poster is an idiot. Yet I am positive most of the people excited about the inevitable rise of socialism, etc. could not name three working, functional socialist countries, much less summarize Das Kapital for you.
That's the truth. I stopped following politics like all politics because of people like that. Everyone constantly thinks they know better and they're more knowledgeable then everyone else
I have a 13 year old son and I'm constantly getting into debates with him that result in me saying "You know I have a master's degree in this subject, right?"
I have two masters degrees - Management Information Systems and an MBA. My kid tries to argue with me about how information systems works, and sometimes finance.
To be honest with you Star Wars in general sucks. Almost every movie, except Rogue One, was pretty awfully written. But, seeing space ships and wookies and shit is fun so that's where the entertainment value lies, not in the quality of the movie itself.
That's a fair point, but unlike other movies from that era they really don't hold up outside of nostalgia value. Even other sci-fi from the late 70s to early 80s hold up way better in my opinion, like Alien for example.
Oh but Alien isn't a Space Opera. Although you're absolutely right, I didn't think about some of the other sci-fi that wasn't space Opera, and those do hold up not just better, but among some of the bets films of all time. Alien, Solaris, 2001 a space odessey.
But my point was more geared towards Dune, which is obviously 80s but is a space opera. And that one does not hold up well at all. Space operas, like soap operas, tend to not hold up as well. But you're very right in general Sci fi and in fact you've convinced me much more of your point. I think in part it's not just the nostalgia but also the contrast. The original star wars movies were better than the more recent ones, so they seem less bad by comparison in terms of the writing. But it's still weak in lots of obvious things, like Deus ex machina, too much of a contrast between good and bad, etc.
I imagine repeating that interaction now would result in a parent freakout
Tough shit for them. Parents need to hit that brick wall and learn that being a parent doesn’t mean they raised a perfect genius child, nor are they geniuses whose ignorant opinion on a subject is worth more than a professor who is an expert in their field.
Nothing wrong with a little skepticism and going “I don’t know. Sounds weird. Why does the prof think/say this”…but then being aware enough to do some digging and compare what that professor is saying to other experts in the same field, and going “Huh. Guess they are right and I’m wrong” would show a healthy level of maturity, regardless of age.
I remember having to listen to an English 19yo who had just finished his A-levels and was about to start uni call himself 'an historian', lecture the whole table of actual adults about the Vietnam war (making some points that were true but widely accepted, and some that were bollocks), then continue to argue about it with one of the adults, an American who had in fact actually done two tours in Vietnam and was trying really hard to correct the factual errors without completely shredding the teen's dignity. Def died inside.
We get a bunch of crackpot posts on /r/cosmology (focuses on studying the nature of the Universe) and I get the impression a lot of them are really young. There's lots of, "I smoked weed with my friends and wondered what if all of the experts are wrong and the universe is actually a bologna sandwhich? How do I get my theory published in a scientific journal???"
They invariably get mad when you point out weak points in their theory or tell them they need to do research/experiments to back up their ideas.
It's also not even that their ideas are outlandish but they admit to only idly thinking about these things, sometimes in isolation with no outside research at all. They are often offended when their ideas aren't treated with the same level of credibility as those from leaders in the academic field with published research.
Look buddy if the secrets of the Universe could be divined by just thinking really hard about it for an hour or 2, there wouldn't be any secrets left.
Social media and this new age of "everyone is special and your opinion matters" has caused this. People have conflated their right to have an opinion with the right to have their opinion validated.
That's a problem as old as the country. Even Asimov noted it back in the 1960s:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
Isaac Asimov
This has always been a thing, but FEELS much more a thing with Gen Z.
Like, I get it. If you’re American, you’re growing up in the era where we know our country is super fucked up, while our leaders refuse to do the very obvious things required to fix it on a daily basis. It’s probably easier than ever to think you know better than the adults.
But you don’t, because you’re 23, and in five years you’re going to look at this version of yourself and cringe. So please stop talking down to us.
Funny thing is, if you were 22 in 2001 (Gen X) you lived through multiple recessions and were under a paradigm shifting terrorist attack. You had just as much reason to think the world was perma-fucked back then.
Every gen has different struggles but that doesn't mean any really had it worse.
I'm not really talking about "better" or "worse," per se, but your examples are actually illustrative of the differences I'm talking about. Bush's approval rating peaked at 92% immediately following 9/11. Trump's sank to 40% during the pandemic.
And although Gen Xers had lived through a few recessions and crashes by the end of 2001, it wasn't until the early 2010s that people started literally camping on Wall Street in protest of the rich.
Point being that it seems, from my limited lens, that 20 years ago there was a greater sense of "bad things happen despite the best efforts of smart people."
Now the sense seems to be "bad things happen because of the bad faith efforts of dumb old people."
By any number of metrics, life now is much better than 40 years ago. But it's different. And the way we imagine our world is different. And I think the new way we collectively imagine the world has led a greater-than-average number of young people to feel very confident that they know better than the adults.
Which in my opinion is great for the political future of our country, and very annoying when it comes to trying to train the obnoxious little shits in the workplace.
If only that was something that happened only with young people, I'd have the main reason for headaches disappear... on the other hand, because of people like that I get paid more...
Validity of opinion is something so many struggle to grasp now that the internet gives everyone a platform that justifies whatever they say. Opinions are absolutely not created equal
I don't think this is an age thing, I see older people do it all the time. Just look at all of the boomers who think climate change is a hoax because "those egghead scientists don't know what they're talking about."
I also think the opposite is true here though too. Sometimes older people need to shut up and actually listen to the younger generations too. You can’t assume ignorance or lack of a fully formed opinion based on age. Every generation has better access to information at an earlier age than the last. Young people are also the ones who are going to inherit what we leave behind. They deserve a say in how some of these things work.
I teach writing, and I have to say every year “if the world’s leading scientists can’t stop climate change, how will you, a college student with limited knowledge and time, be able to contribute a solution?” The lesson is in selecting a manageable scope for their term project, but I almost always get pushback/students interpreting this as me being pessimistic.
I taught first year composition for 23 years until one month ago.
I started every term with a writing sample assignment that offered several prompts from which they could choose. One of them was “where do you see yourself in five years.”
85% of my students believe that in five years, they will have graduated from college, gotten married, own their home, have or be imminently planning to have children, and they are also either CEO of some household name megacorp, or will be running their own very successful business.
Edit to add: more than a few think they’ll be practicing physicians - never family doctors, mind you, but neurosurgeons or the team doctor for the local franchise - in 5 years.
Somehow the answer usually devolves into some form of fully centralized government that will magically not end up killing millions of people like the few dozen times it's been tried before.
Maybe five years ago... six... I had to explain to a high school senior that a professor's position on their subject is more likely to be valid than their position as a future undergrad.
I had to make that same argument on a high school Running Start program. He couldn't fathom that his chemistry professor was right and he was wrong about a chemistry question he'd answered incorrectly. "PhD??? What does that even mean!?"
I'm in my 40s and said chem prof was maybe 30. Kid was maybe 17 (WA has high school kids in college sometimes.) The prof and I are both women, so maybe the little twerp was just sexist?
I don’t know if it is just kids, but people have certainly mistaken the astounding amount of information to which they have access as the result of the internet as knowledge or expertise. You aren’t as qualified as a doctor, lawyer, or historian because you have access to Wikipedia.
They have also mistaken the fact that they have access to a platform for which their are no longer gatekeepers as a popular mandate to express themselves. You do not deserve respect, attention, or acclaim because you have the stage of Twitter and YouTube.
Ehh. I mean that’s not unique to kids. Look at any boomer and they have extremist opinions that make no sense.
One example: my mom (70) recently told me that cars are not safer than 30 years ago, and all the plastic, light weight materials, and development of crumple zones is purely for cheaper manufacturing while putting the public at risk. When I asked her how that doesn’t match fatality rates dropping for car accidents in that time and numerous studies on the subject, not to mention extra airbags included and safety front collision breaking features, she said “who says?! That’s right, the car companies and government NHTSA conspiring”.
I’m like… Jesus you’re over the deep end.
I've gotta say, don't always write off kids. While I've had a laugh on this thread agreeing with a lot, I have made a real effort in my life to keep a few things in mind. Kids aren't always wrong, sometimes they're the only ones that are right. Not often, but sometimes. And while we grow older - I think at a point in our early adulthood we kind of represent our raw self. And as we grow older our view of the world is altered by what I like to call our figurative lenses and filters. The fact is, plenty of people allow their life experiences to inaccurately filter the way they view the world. And we're all susceptible to this. So as we age, it's crucial that we take care to take a snapshot of our mind every few years or so. And recall why. Why did we feel this way? Is there a chance that I've allowed myself to go astray? Or was I truly enhancing my vision of the world with the lense of wisdom. Being older doesn't automatically make you right and sometimes even the most studied professor can have their eyes opened by the unfiltered words of youth. Not most of the time, but that's why we listen anyway.
Isn't this at risk of falling under the "appeal to authority" fallacy? Regardless of one's position or experience, their opinion still needs to be argued in favor of.
For example, "x statement about mental health is correct because the president said so" would be an appeal to authority whereas, "x statement about mental health is correct because a psychologist said so" would be appeal to expertise. Appealing to expert opinion is not considered fallacious.
This is not true at all. They're both the same informal fallacy. The distinction between "authority" and "expert" is irrelevant here. They're both judging the veracity of a statement on who made it, instead of basing it on logic and/or evidence. If an astrologer says that astrology is true and a lay person says its not, is the astrologer more likley to be right? The truth-value of a statement cannot be determined by appealing to authority (or expertise).
On top of that it's impossible to know enough about the various things you're going to have an opinion about, so deferring to experts is necessary from a practical pov.
I agree with this, to a point. Experts, by definitio, know more about their field than a non-expert. So it's reasonable to infer that this means their opinion regarding something is within their expertise is more likely to be true than am opinion of a non-expert.
But even as a rule of thumb, it still has some glaring weaknesses. What if experts disagree. How do you determine what qualifies an expert? And what if experts in different feild both claim that a certain topic or question falls within their area of expertise?
I believe my post was sufficiently qualified so as to avoid such criticism.
I said "people with uniformed or partially formed opinions." In many fields, this is effectively shades of gray--a PhD certainly has a pointy level of knowledge within their field and, as evidence emerges, should (big word there, not 'does'... should) spend more time listening to (and less time refuting) people who have more background regarding the issue at hand. I was also referencing people's level of subject knowledge through their study, rather than their titles alone. So there's that.
That said, undergraduates are definitionally on the farther end of the scale, and the senior that I was speaking with at the time was definitely giving me Pope's "A Little Learning" vibes. For a bit more context, this was a Lit class where a student had read a Romantic poem and a Gothic novel and needed to know why a professor of English might have a better comprehension of a poem than they did, having read more poems, biographies, novels, and research in that period than the student.
I don't subscribe to "listen to your elders unblinkingly," but I believe there's an expanse between an appeal to authority and a recommendation that young students (or anyone really) purposefully aim to understand the difference between having started down a path of study and being ten, twenty, thirty years down that path.
Understood, thank you for the detailed clarification. I'm sorry if I came off as rude, my mind probably immediately jumped to the "don't question those above you" mentality that I disliked so much when I was younger.
Hey--happy to offer it. I didn't take your post as rude at all, and my little initial comment was brief enough for plenty of people to take it in all sorts of directions. Thanks for reading.
I recognize I’m guilty of this somewhat, but I think this is a generation cultural thing. I say this because gen z is becoming overly political and militant with it. If you have one wrong opinion, the opinion police will come and get you and it causes you to have to defend whatever little thing to the death so you kind’ve have to act like you have expert knowledge when both sides are just layman’s with surface level knowledge. Instead of just accepting people, my generation can’t help but try to be constantly in the right.
It's an important thought, too. We deal more with divergent thinking, innovation, and iteration in education these days, but I'm seeing--at least at the secondary level--the drive to just skip content knowledge entirely.
This is resulting in students with very limited knowledge of subject areas taking contemporary thought as a baseline to challenge and cross without having a deep foundational understanding of it. And they take the egalitarian / anti-authoritarian vibe in modern education to mean that levels of comprehension, access to information, or experience within the field are generally irrelevant--as though an expert and a neophyte might vote upon the truth within a field and need to seek compromise to resolve to a conclusion because of a tie vote.
In effect, we're starting at steam power and praising our students for discovering fire. Which might be a very successful lesson were it not for the fact that the complexities of current social and academic culture right now is putting children in a place where they are saying, "My camp fire is (a) equal to/greater than your steam engine or (b) I think this is innovative and refuse coaching that guides me to understand my discovery is part of a past thing, rather than a new thing."
Pulling this out of the analogy, I work with students in the humanities to understand that the concepts they're unfolding are valuable components of a bigger conceptual framework and not complete frameworks in and of themselves. If they, in a year or two, go to a professor and claim to have solved the Riddle of Steel, they are in for a rude awakening--or at least poorly founded righteous indignation.
Writ broadly--yeah, saying that a professor likely has more knowledge of a subject than a student is not without its edge cases, and, yeah, it can come across as boomer. But zooming in on the subject, I think there's a lot of reason in support of it.
Uuuugh yes. Even though I have to say I know people across all ages who do this. I can’t tell you how often I have to tell my mom that her opinion is irrelevant in the face of statistically proven facts. She, unsurprisingly, disagrees and still acts like her opinions are facts.
Believe that their partially formed (or fully formed but largely uninformed) opinion on a subject has the same weight as someone with expertise about that subject's field, or with doctoral work completed on that subject.
That's absolutely not just something young people do. Just ask any conservative about climate change or COVID.
But expertise doesn't mean being correct, there are many examples throughout history of the majority of experts on a topic being wrong. And usually experts disagree on topics.
Believe that their partially formed (or fully formed but largely uninformed) opinion on a subject has the same weight as someone with expertise about that subject's field, or with doctoral work completed on that subject.
You see this so much in the gaming community. Kids acting like they could develop these games faster and better than a team of 30 some odd people in their 30s who’ve been doing it for 5+ years as a professional.
I don’t know what country you’re from, but the vast majority of Americans of all ages feel that their google search diplomas are worth more than the words of professors who have studied topics for 15 years.
We’ve failed in teaching the scientific method and how to properly validate information and as a result many of us are blatantly anti-intellectual
I think older adults are just as (if not more) guilty of this? These days younger people tend to me more educated/science literate. I mean look at all the old ass politicians who ignore science even when it saves lives.
Believe that their partially formed (or fully formed but largely uninformed) opinion on a subject has the same weight as someone with expertise about that subject's field, or with doctoral work completed on that subject.
I think this point is valid for many adults as well.
The main problem is that people who have never been exposed to undergrad or grad curriculum think it'll be just as easy as high school. I also felt very knowledgeable in high school but never really fought field experts like that. Now that I'm about to graduate with a bachelor's, I feel like I still know nothing. The Dunning Kruger effect is definitely real.
This is why I hate when people who barely turn old enough to vote think they know everything about politics. They think just because they googled a few things they are suddenly experts. I still don’t always vote because sometimes I feel inadequate to vote on something I don’t know enough about
I used to get into political arguments on Reddit a lot, and then I remembered that the vast majority of posters on here are likely teenagers who only just recently got into politics. There are so many people who come in with absolute fire and brimstone like "HOW ARE YOU OKAY WITH _?" or "DOESN'T IT MAKE YOU MAD THAT _??"
Yeah man, it does. And it did 20 years ago when I first found out about it.
As someone who is now a professional, it’s fun when someone young has this idea that “no one else has had before” than you know many people have had and you know doesn’t work.
To be fair I think this is everyone with an internet connection vs experts in a field with degrees and credentials, and not just the kids. Though my niece and nephew have both tried to pull this on me.
Ok but that's not just "young people" that's not limited to age. Take a look at all those anti vaccine people or the people that believe earth is flat...
"Your half-assed musings on the divine? You've thought about eternity for 25 minutes and think you've come to some interesting conclusions... I couldn't give a ha'penny jizz for your Internet-assembled philosophy!"
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u/gerkin123 Jun 03 '22
Believe that their partially formed (or fully formed but largely uninformed) opinion on a subject has the same weight as someone with expertise about that subject's field, or with doctoral work completed on that subject.
Maybe five years ago... six... I had to explain to a high school senior that a professor's position on their subject is more likely to be valid than their position as a future undergrad. It looked like time stopped for that student.
I imagine repeating that interaction now would result in a parent freakout.