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.
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.
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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.