I really like this board. People ask questions, they get answers. Some times I think the questions are stupid, but they still deserve polite answers and this board will supply them. And if they’re not so polite your friendly neighbourhood mod will chastise the offender.
But some posters ask questions (and sometimes give answers) not based on a lack of knowledge, but based on a superabundance of flawed knowledge that they’re not open to re-evaluating, so politely answering their questions and pointing out the flawed assumptions underlying them gets nowhere. Just a restatement of the original question.
“No, your statement that only iron rusts and copper gains protection from further oxidation by a layer of verdigris doesn’t answer my question of why the statue of Liberty hasn’t rusted away by now. And no, I’m not interested in corrosion of the inner iron skeleton, why hasn’t the surface rusted away like on a car?”
Of course yelling at them doesn’t work any better than it does with regular humans, which is why I’ve retreated to this place to vent. Also I’m sure any resulting thread will eventually devolve into claiming half the posters here fall into this category and then I can go back to despairing for humanity as a whole rather than worrying about the subset of the supermisinformed.
This is the point at which some know-it-all will refer to the Dunning-Kruger effect, so I will:
The potentially scary part about this (which I guess the Superignorant don’t consider) is that there’s no reason that this effect can’t apply to you, yourself. And if it did, you would, by the terms of the effect, not be aware that it did. This should have a sobering effect. But it probably won’t.
Still, I like to think that I’m at least more savvy than the guy who inspired the study:
A great deal of posters on this very message board that claims to fight “ignorance” fall into this category. It’s a sad state of humanity when the smartest, coolest, hippest and smartest people on the internet are dumb.
I can’t remember the fancy terms, but there are related psychological effects that are big allies of ignorance. If you’re confronted with information that contradicts deeply held beliefs you’re more liable to double down on the original belief than reject it. If people hear that something isn’t true, later they will conflate it with the truth.
One problem for some of us is when it is made into an emotional issue.
If someone says, “No, that’s not correct; the real answer is 54,” I’m much more willing to concede, “I must have been in error.”
But if they say, “Look, you jackass, you obviously don’t know anything about the subject, and I insist that you retract what you said right now,” then I’m gonna be emotionally involved. That leads to huffiness, stuffiness, and stubbornness.
Christians say, “Hate the sin, not the sinner.” We Dopers need to be more careful about attacking the error, and not the person who posted it. Cornering people and getting triumphalist on their asses is a poor educational process.
(Of course, if they persist beyond a reasonable degree, haul 'em into the Pit and fry 'em up. Fair is fair.)
Wouldn’t work very good for the ignorant. If they ignore themselves… well, there are buses and stuff out there. Ignorant people ignoring themselves, pretty soon there wouldn’t…
