The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.
This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.
When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.
I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!
And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.
So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?
If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?
Dude I’ve had people on Lemmy tell me that I am wrong about the contents of my own mind.
I tell them, this is what I believe and why (and my arguments citations whatever)
And they say, no, obviously you’re lying and you believe this other thing instead. And then they start digging through my history and constructing arguments and debating me on it.
Some instances I don’t go on that much anymore
I don’t believe you. Why are you making up this kind of shit?
Seriously, though, sounds like you’ve had the average lemmygrad or hexbear encounter.
So after your first sentence, I was all ready to dig back through my comments to try to find it. It was absolutely baffling.
(Probably it would be sour grapes for me to dig up some old argument with somebody just so I can break it back out here, and say “THE MAN WAS WRONG, I TELL YOU, HE WAS WRONG, LOOK AT HIM AND HIS WRONG PLEASE EVERYBODY AGREE ABOUT IT”)
Yeah, I’ve found that the best thing to do when you (accidentally or intentionally) kick the tankie-hive is to block the ones who don’t realize that not everything needs to be debunked or even commented, and then move on and forget about it.
That’s more than a lack of respect for expertise, that’s a lack of basic human respect.
I furiously dislike people explaining me to me.
You don’t deserve that treatment but the unfortunate reality is a lot of people, to borrow a great description from the The Alt-Right Playbook, “try on opinions like hats.” They don’t say what they believe or think, they test drive arguments in service of the debate in front of them and discard them when they don’t fit as if they never said it. It’s incredibly irritating and unproductive, while also being incredibly common.
It’s basically a really shitty and disingenuous version of playing devil’s advocate. Something we all should’ve grown out of after like 18/freshman year of college.
Just providing context for what a lot of people experience daily online.
Oh I love that. It happens a lot in political discussions when you don’t 100% agree with someone’s point.
“I don’t think defunding the police will solve the issues we’re facing” means getting called a boot licker and that every comment you’ve ever made that doesn’t scream “I hate cops” is about to be linked to for proof that you’re a Trump loving Nazi.