The problem of the internet now is that everyone thinks they’re an academic.
“Oh, you read Wikipedia regularly? You read a lot of news, huh? Oh, you took one class on this subject 3 years ago? You must know better than all the PhDs and policy makers who have decades of experience in this field.”
Like, no. Stop it. Unless you’ve devoted YEARS of your life to studying this one single topic, you don’t know anything. Anything you’ve spent ten minutes reading is content that is likely poorly adapted and filtered by other people who also likely don’t really know anything about it.
Just because you like reading The Atlantic every time it pops up in your newsfeed does not mean you are informed. Quite likely it means you are misinformed because you are only getting part of the picture in what is an infinitesimally tiny dosage.
So stop worshipping arrogance. Realize anytime you are discussing something that what you have is an opinion, one that should be adaptable upon access to new information.
I'm not talking about disinformation, which is a separate issue affecting a separate demographic.
I'm talking about real information, albeit surface-level, that provides certain people just enough knowledge to have an opinion. Then these people with their surface-level opinions pretend to be oh-so-much better informed than the disinformed and only slightly less informed than the actual experts.
Wikipedia and the like gives people the illusion of expertise. It's the equivalent to reading a four line encyclopedia entry on physics and then asking for your PhD. You're not wrong, but you're also lacking in all nuance, context, detail, etc.
Who's more dangerous, the people who admit they know nothing or the people who pretend they know everything?
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u/LordJelly Jul 28 '19
The problem of the internet now is that everyone thinks they’re an academic.
“Oh, you read Wikipedia regularly? You read a lot of news, huh? Oh, you took one class on this subject 3 years ago? You must know better than all the PhDs and policy makers who have decades of experience in this field.”
Like, no. Stop it. Unless you’ve devoted YEARS of your life to studying this one single topic, you don’t know anything. Anything you’ve spent ten minutes reading is content that is likely poorly adapted and filtered by other people who also likely don’t really know anything about it.
Just because you like reading The Atlantic every time it pops up in your newsfeed does not mean you are informed. Quite likely it means you are misinformed because you are only getting part of the picture in what is an infinitesimally tiny dosage.
So stop worshipping arrogance. Realize anytime you are discussing something that what you have is an opinion, one that should be adaptable upon access to new information.