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?

  • bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 months ago

    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.