Bingo. I’ve seen a bunch of self-published books, ones the author thought were good enough to pay money to submit to a contest, that wouldn’t have made it past the most superficial scrutiny. And posting is a lot lower bar than paying to get a book published.
In my experience most of the sinners in this area aren’t expert in anything, except maybe widget assembly or sweeping floors. Being an expert in a field often exposes you to people who make elementary mistakes about it, plus, having the experience of going through the work of attaining expertise can make you realize what you don’t know about other fields.
The few real experts who are clueless about other things and don’t know it seem to come from ego (Linus Pauling) or fanaticism about some area which they try to support through their misplaced expertise - like creationist lawyers.
Absolutely this. The problem is that I’m in the (in many other ways very fortunate and pleasant) situation where I get a lot of people, in total, communicating with me - thousands and thousands of them; this tends to amplify the perception of the bad so it seems disproportionate to the good.
I know you’re kidding, but yeah; they’re not - and that is another interesting facet of the problem; there is no amount of preloading you can do that will forestall the ‘yes, but’ - even if you think to mention that your neighbours have all astroturfed their gardens, or that you have no neighbours, that merely invites the nitpickers to try to imagine some other scenario that you haven’t mentioned (“Yes, but beekeepers move their hives around, so some of the bees might have previously been in contact with pollen elsewhere”) - the problem is not the information, its something else.
Yes, except it depends on the editor. We would not always agree on which book has the most nonsense, but I think we could agree that there commonly are professionally edited books full of nonsense on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
A variant I saw a lot during the runup to the 2016 & 2020 elections was an inability of many folks to separate a prediction of what will happen from a preference about what should happen.
I would say “I think Trump will win in 2016 because …” and I’d get roasted by people thinking I was a Trump supporter. They could not separate the idea of a dispassionate prediction from cheerleading for an outcome. I got to adding a boilerplate sentence up front about my preference not matching my prediction, and that just triggered a different kind of uncomprehension.
I’m not sure, but there must be some of this that’s the same, and some different, depending on if it is political.
Non-political might be more of a pure echo chamber to extremism.
On the non-political, one example I saw was with ivermectin for herding dogs (this is long before COVID). A legitimate research study showed some dogs being sickened or, rarely, killed by high doses used to cure a condition. But it is also used, at much lower doses, as a preventive. This study resulted in internet posters insisting that if you gave ivermectin as a preventive, you were a monster. This resulted in real world switching to a less effective preventative. (Although the ivermectin-free heart worm preventatives prescribed by vets today may be just as good and indicated in areas where ivermectin resistance has developed.)
Oh yeah, that’s super common. I guess it’s a corollary of the magical thinking where if you believe in something hard enough, you can make it happen. If that’s true, then someone who is pessimistic about a thing must want the opposite to happen.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
I’m not sure it’s a cult of ignorance, exactly. But there is certainly a persistent meme of the smart country boy running rings round all them college perfessors with their book-larnin’
I don’t feel the problem is that the internet is dumber than the offline world. The problem is the internet is bigger.
If you discuss something like growing squashes with the people you meet in person, you’re probably only going to talk about it with five to ten people. If the discussion on squash occurs on the internet, there may be fifty to a hundred people who comment.
And as the size of the group grows larger, the likelihood of encountering people out on the fringe who hold extreme beliefs on the topic increases. And while these people on the fringe may be a small minority in the conversation, they’re often the loudest and most noticeable participants.
Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.”[6]
Also, he described the term as a view that “intellectuals…are pretentious, conceited… and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive … The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise.”[7]
I think you’re right - and the conversation partners are sort of self-selecting - if you talk about squashes on the internet, the people who have nothing to say, say nothing; the people who agree, probably say nothing; the people who just have to blurt out this thing they know, are the ones to say it.
Today, BTW, it was peanuts. I was preparing some raw white beans by soaking and peeling them and I remarked on how they resembled peanuts, and how maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise, since peanuts are essentially beans.
The internet was quick to confidently incorrect me that it was pretty sure peanuts are some sort of tuber, since they grow in the ground.
And an inverse of that in most legal discussions. People claim to be arguing about what the law actually says, but instead they’re arguing over what they think the law should say. The people arguing for what it should be often make more sense than the legislators who voted in the complex or unjust law, or the judges who have interpreted it, but, of course, a sound argument for how things should be does not change how things are.
Lately I’ve seen some very funny trolling of this type of respondent. The one I particularly liked, though I can’t find, was a mundane selfie “check out my new earrings” or whatever, but in the background was a dishwasher containing a cast iron skillet (which was the whole point of the picture). Many comments about the best way to care for cast iron.
Here is another. This is a screen shot of a post on Bluesky of a screenshot of a post on Threads.
Image from “drewtoothpaste” who says, “the only thing i’ve been posting on threads is pics of toxic mushrooms i find in the forest and comments that imply im eating them” (sic). Below are two pictures. The first is an orange mushroom with the text “mouth tingling very dizzyp,” and the second a white mushroom with the text “forest mushroom, didnt taste good.”
When Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson was running for president in the 1950s, a supporter purportedly said to him: “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you.” Stevenson replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do — I need a majority.”
