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?
in mental health, yes actually, a surprisingly large amt of people look to me to be the expert. it’s often just as challenging to help someone see that they’re the expert on themselves.
you’d expect a lot of tiktok diagnoses and bizarro pseudo science attitudes, and while those do come up, they aren’t that prevalent. and it’s usually a symptom of something, i.e. someone with paranoid/grandiose delusions preaching med noncompliance.
I dont encounter anyone who thinks my work is just a joke, but plenty who believe I cant help them and they’re better off on their own
Yes. Because if they don’t believe me the internet breaks.
Source: I am a network engineer
I was once accused on Reddit of being a bot after spending half an hour crafting a reply to a question with detail and examples. It’s a great way to discourage people from trying to be helpful 🫠
“This is AI-generated content” seems to be the new slur seeking to shame people into silence. Better than “Incel”, I suppose, but certainly more insidious and less dismissively hyperbolic.
My guess is interactions like that are probably going to get more frequent as LLM use and possible backlash against them increases, since people who aren’t particularly good at spotting LLM text just think long = bot.
Yes. I work in the aerospace industry. I’m a woman. When Space Karen first appeared on the scene, he immediately had millions of young, impressionable fanboys. Fanboys who would passionately disagree with you when you explained how something Space Karen spouted into the ether one day didn’t will it into existence. And Space Karen said a lot of dumb shit.
Nevertheless, he said it, you disagree, you are wrong because you disagree with something he said, and your education, skills, experience, and qualifications over many years are meaningless.
That went on for years before he finally showed himself to be the narcissistic manchild many of us saw in the beginning. It’s a double-edged sword…on one hand you feel vindicated, but on the other you wish it didn’t have to come to this to make it happen.
The worse is that you didn’t even had to be that well studied to know he was full of bullshit from the start, I remember even before he was Space Karen when he tried to be Train Karen, and their fanboys wouldn’t understand that vacuum tubes Km long for transporting people were a BAD idea for several reasons.
Who the hell is space karen?
The African-American guy who won’t shut up and also killed Twitter.
African-American guy
Never thought about him this way, but true!
I read an article about a (white) guy born in - maybe - Zimbabwe but definitely Africa. He moved to the US and his school had a scholarship / fund for African-Americans. He was the only pupil that qualified so applied for a laugh. Can’t remember how it ended.
I’d like to think that “Spaceship Karen” doesn’t find the phrase funny - but being such a glorious champion of free speech he’ll just have to suck it up.
Ohhhhhh. I should’ve guessed that. Sorry can be a bit dense sometimes.
Tbh my brain immediately gave me a fifty-fifty. Say what you want about Bezos but, in my head, he’s more of a Cruella than a Karen. I then guessed the lady in the post was talking about the other space guy. I don’t blame you drawing a temporary blank, new names and all that.
Software engineers, supposed “experts”, can’t even agree among each other how to structure and build software, let alone agree with project managers, users and other laypeople.
Source: Am software engineer.
I’d call it healthy debate but I’ve never met a software engineer who had a healthy anything
Lulz
“Here’s a complete analysis of your situation and how to resolve it.”
“I don’t agree with these issues you’ve pointed out.”
“Ok, here’s the proof that you’re wrong but thanks for pointing these things out as you helped me find more issues, so cost just went up, wanna do that again?”
😐
One of the things that irated me most from Reddit was the fact that if someone’s response came quickly enough, upvotes will ensure everyone believe it and downvoting it was like peeing on a wildfire.
I like that kbin shows both upvotes and downvotes which tells me when something is controversial enough to give it some thought rather than believe it blindly.
Buddy, I don’t even believe me.
lmao. I worked at FDA for about a decade, was one of the main programmers for their system that tracks approval of biologics, as well as the system that tracks and handles approvals of individual biological lots. And then the MAGAts started making up bullshit conspiracy stuff about how biologics are developed and approved … :/
Those people turn everything they touch into shit.
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The Mierdas Touch
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I work in IT and security, where everyone is an expert. Couple that with my inability to tell half-thruths about complex subjects I have incomplete info about, and I come out as incompetent. Yay.
That’s my experience too. There’s always a “bigger expert”.
They tell you you’re expertise is irrelevant. They’re the real expert.
What a joke
Are you one of the people I depend on who write useful information on the internet sharing their expertise?
I worked in politics and have a degree in international affairs so people definitely argue about that. But I got good enough at coding and Linux that it became my career and people tend to trust me on that stuff.
There’s certain fields where everyone thinks they’d be good at it and they’re wrong. Voice acting is probably one. Seems easy but it’s really fucking not. And most people who think they understand politics don’t know basics about how legislative committees work, much less negotiated rulemaking.
It varies, I think the most important part for any kind of online discussion is to establish credibility based on the argument not credibility based on title or degree.
It’s also important to recognize a challenge on its own merits. I don’t care if you flip burgers at Wendy’s, if you can argue a point on the merits I’ll hear you out (and try to politely explain why you’re wrong – in understandable language – if needed).
I hate the “trust me bro I’m a X, it’s an elite field, it would take years to explain this to you and you wouldn’t even understand anyways” attitude some professionals take. The real experts that I’ve met and I respect can simplify the subject matter they’re an expert of (to be digestible and reasonable to most people) and I aspire to be that insightful.
That’s totally fair, I agree.
The version that upsets me most is when I offer a perspective from my expertise, well founded and reasonable, and rather than ask questions to understand or offer a competing idea, people so often just say that I must be an idiot and know nothing about the topic.
I can hardly reply with “no, you’re the stupid one!” coz that just really doesn’t help.
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.
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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.
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.
Ha. The VIP that I work for doesn’t have time for me to tell them how to solve their technical issues. So, no, not currently. But in the past it was different.
My boss doesn’t even believe me when I say “we did that already”
