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?
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.
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
spoiler
sdfsaf
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.
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.
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.
I struggle to make my mum take my advice about subjects of my field of expertise for which I had spent 5 cruel years at Uni. So I am at peace now not being able to make my point across the internet.
LOL, I work in climate science.
Specifically in consequential carbon accounting analysis. Which is the branch that specializes in quantifying how much impact decisions and policies will have on greenhouse gas levels.
We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.
I comment regularly on social media about what actually needs to happen if we’re to limit the damage from WW3 to just seriously fucked. You can imagine how that goes.
People advocate for things on Reddit or Lemmy about what we should be doing to avoid the disaster. Most of the time these things will have little benefit, and often will make things worse. I try to educate people but everybody has their pet issues usually based on whatever article they read last and they don’t actually want to seek the truth, just defend their opinion.
It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another. People aren’t wrong about the small part they’re looking at, just its impact on the bigger picture.
Everyone is pulling in different directions on this issue because the waters have been so incredibly muddied by the people who stand to lose from real climate action.
We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.
Very interested in hearing your best-case and worst-case outcomes for humanity over the next 30 or so years. Worst-case being, of course, the “business as usual” path that we have not deviated from at all.
I don’t know, but it’s bad.
At this point even our best case scenarios are still pretty bad; barring some massive breakthrough in carbon sequestration tech.
And the “business as usual” scenarios are down right scary, millions of deaths annually. Never mind the economic consequences.
In my other comment I talked about what needs to happen on the macro level.
But the micro level is another story.
I’m worried because the paths to mitigating the worst of it depend mostly on countries, people, corporations etc… making major changes to drive reductions.
I seen the strategies the big companies have… they’re not coming close to making the difference needed. And the small companies aren’t even trying to measure their emissions let alone reducing them. It’s that lack of data that’s a part the problem. The data needed for decisions at the micro level isn’t available. It’s difficult to even identify what changes to make because you don’t know what impact a change might have outside of your control.
So far it means we haven’t even got emissions to start going down. At best, they’ve just slowed the rate at which they’re going up.
Governments should be pushing harder to mandate emissions reporting, but it’s politically unpopular so we’re still largely guessing about what decisions to make and that’s what leads to us all pulling in different directions making little progress.
It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another.
This is one of the major truths of adulthood that keeps on coming up over and over again. The other is how do you know that some really knows what they say they know without investing time, money, and mental power into meeting them and knowing the basics of the subject all while being humble enough to know you don’t know shit about it.
I’d love to hear your top points of what actually needs to happen.
(Sorry for the length here… this is actually my shortened version)
89% of climate change is because we took carbon that was permanently sequestered underground in the form of oil, gas, and coal and burned it for cheap energy. We need to stop that entirely but you can’t “just stop oil”, you need to remove the demand not try to disrupt the supply.
There are 4 broad strokes to making that happen:
- We need a metric fuck ton more carbon-free electricity generation asap. Not just enough to replace all existing fossil fuel-based electricity generation, but enough to supply double to triple the current generation capacity. Only about a quarter of the energy we get from fossil fuels is used to generate electricity, so as we switch things over to electricity, demand will increase exponentially.
Renewables are great and we need to build as much as we possibly can, but what people don’t get is the sheer quantity needed. No matter how much money is thrown at new renewables projects we simply can’t build enough of them fast enough due to bottlenecks in supply chains, raw material mining, grid interconnection times, and other limits.
New nuclear is the only other major option to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. People resist it because of safety or waste concerns (neither are backed by data, nuclear is tied with solar for the safest tech, and it generates less radioactive waste than coal). Or they think nuclear has a big carbon footprint when you include the manufacturing and disposal (also not what the data says, nuclear is tied with wind for the lowest full lifecycle carbon emissions and is about half as much as solar). Or they argue renewables are cheaper which is at least mostly true, but it isn’t as clear cut either when you factor in the costs of connecting that many renewable power projects to the grid. Connecting one nuclear power plant to the grid is significantly cheaper than connecting the 100+ wind and solar farms needed for the same quantity of electricity. Not to mention the cost of storage.
We want to be building renewables, but we can’t wait around for renewables to save us that’s just not going to happen fast enough, our best option is building as many renewables as possible and a bunch of new nuclear and anything else carbon free at the same time.
- We need to electrify everything that runs on fossil fuels. Cars, furnaces, industrial uses, everything needs to switch from burning oil, gas, and coal, to being electrically powered.
But deciding what to electrify, when and in what order is complicated too…. adding to electricity demand before we’ve removed fossil fuel power generation from the grid, results in the scale-up of the fossil fuel generation to meet the increased demand. Until fossil fuels are gone from the electric grid, we should only electrify something if its efficiency is sufficient to still reduce emissions when we assume it’s powered by the most polluting form of electricity generation on the grid.
Battery electric vehicles have reached that point including factoring in the high-carbon footprint of lithium-ion manufacturing. Even if charged exclusively with coal power a BEV has lower lifetime emissions than an ICE car. Even discarding ICE cars before their end of life to replace with a BEV will generally be a net win.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the other hand (pretty much anything hydrogen-powered for that matter) aren’t even close. Using Hydrogen to power vehicles is not a tech we should be investing in right now.
Even if you’ve built a dedicated solar or wind farm to power something you want to electrify that hasn’t reached that efficiency threshold, you need to ask if it’s better to use that solar farm to displace current coal or natural gas-based electricity generation than to power your newly electrified whatever. This is why even so-called “green hydrogen” is a counter-productive tech to be investing in right now.
It’s also why some DAC and CCS techs shouldn’t be built yet. Even if you plan to build a dedicated solar or wind farm to power it. It’s often more impactful to just connect that solar/wind farm to the grid instead to reduce fossil fuel-based generation than to use it to power CCS. DAC and CCS is a rapidly developing space, we’re all hoping for some new breakthrough techs here that changes this story… so don’t criticize research in this area as a dead end… we don’t know that.
Hopefully, you’re starting to understand why so many of these discussions are more nuanced than people on Reddit/Lemmy claim…. a lot of new electrification technologies are just on the borderline here for not causing more emissions, and it often depends on where you live and what will be scaled up to meet the added electric demand.
All of this points back to why we need massive quantities of carbon-free electricity. Without clean electricity, these other techs aren’t a net win. Many things will cause a net increase in emissions if they’re electrified before carbon-free electricity is abundant. We need more new carbon-free electricity generation built in the next two decades than all the fossil fuel generation we’ve built in the last century put together. Even with ridiculously optimistic exponential growth projections of renewables, it is just not going to be enough. Until we’ve sequestered so much carbon that we’re back to pre-industrial levels, there will always be new techs that are “unlocked” by any additional carbon-free electricity generation.
- We need society to transition to lower consumption of everything in general. Every product or service you buy has a carbon footprint of some kind. There’s a LOT to be done around making smarter choices about what you buy, yes an EV is better than an ICE car, but public transit, electric scooters, bicycles, and ton of other things are better than any car, and not buying things at all if you if you don’t need them is better still.
Capitilizim’s tendency to push towards ever more consumption is the largest driver of the problem here. We can’t have circular economies if the only metric we’re looking at is the bottom line. Our modern mentalities of disposable products, planned obsolescence, fast fashion, and other things we’ve come to associate with a “high quality of life” in wealthy nations need to be re-evaluated.
- We need better data to make better decisions. Corporations aren’t required to measure and report their emissions. We’re still largely making educated guesses at the carbon footprint of things because the only data available for most things are broad estimates and industry averages. Our supply chains are so interconnected, that trying to calculate how much of an impact a particular product has requires data from potentially thousands of companies that they’re not even collecting, let alone publishing.
The EU is starting to mandate carbon reporting, but the US and Canada are lagging in this area. The US SEC proposed last year making reporting mandatory for publicly traded companies but caved to a bunch of pushback from corporations. They did pass a mandatory reporting rule a couple of months ago, but with significant retractions on what needs to be reported and how soon. They dropped a provision that would have required companies to report on emissions they’re causing to occur in their supply chains (known as “Scope 3” emissions), which would have put significant pressure on smaller and non-publicly traded companies to also report on emissions.
Until the vast majority of corporations are tracking emissions, even the corporations that are trying to reduce emissions are limited in effectiveness because they are basing decisions only on how it impacts them directly and not what impact it might have elsewhere.
Anyhow… that’s the “big things”….
There are a lot of interesting little things that could be happening but aren’t, usually because they clash with a particular political ideology. For example, the government could pay contractors to go from house to house and upgrade the insulation, and it would have one of the best emission reductions for the dollar than almost anything we’ve quantified. But politically there’s a “It’s not fair to take money from my pocket to pay for someone else’s insulation” mentality that some people have that prevent many low-hanging fruit things…
And on the flip side, some of the things that we’re doing that generally aren’t working include:
Most carbon offsets on the market are bullshit, including a lot of nature-based offsets. The mentality of “don’t reduce just offset” emissions doesn’t work. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for offsets, there is, but the carbon offset market in general is full of bad actors. It’s trivially easy to misrepresent creative accounting as a carbon offset, even if it’s not intentional. And since there’s no tangible product delivered, some companies will sell the same carbon offset to multiple buyers. If you don’t believe me, I have
a bridgecarbon offsets to sell you.Another thing that isn’t working is most (if not all) RECs, GOs and similar market-based instruments for purchasing “green electricity” from the grid. You’re not changing the net emissions, you are literally just paying for the privilege of claiming your electricity consumption isn’t generating emissions. You’re not making more renewable get built, renewables are already cost-effective, they don’t need someone voluntarily paying extra for them for them to happen. If you pay extra for them, you’re just increasing someone’s profits.
Note that RECs and GOs are not the same things as private PPAs, like when Amazon or Microsoft pay to build new nuclear to power their data centres. Again lots of nuances here, but PPAs are causing additional carbon-free electricity to be built. RECs and GOs where you’re selling renewables that have already been built aren’t changing anything, just upping profit margins.
Thank you for writing that up! Much appreciated.
In your case, I’m guessing lots of people have heard the horror stories of shitty, scammy repair techs in various fields (automobiles being one prominent example). The good ones have to deal with the occupational reputation driven by the worst of them.
For me, I don’t consider myself a real expert in any specific subject, but I’m adjacent to a number of financial areas. I try not to delve into the weeds of those internet discussions too often (like I said, not an ironclad expert), and even when I do, it’s only to address the most egregious errors. Money can be an emotional topic, and many of those opinions are based on the way people want the world to be rather than the way it is, so show up with facts and references and they tend to understand.
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.
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
Not an expert on shit, but… My rule of thumb is to not believe anything, from anyone, in a social media context. Anyone can say they’re whatever; I can’t verify if that is the truth though. And I also cannot verify if those who verify others are trustworthy. The only way you can prove you are who you say you are is to doxx yourself.
I’m a CFI. on the subjects of aerodynamics, navigation, instrumentation, aircraft systems, aviation law, my word is usually accepted. I’m apparently the least knowledgeable person in the world on the subjects of aviation physiology and aeromedical factors. What could a pilot possibly know about hypoxia?
I’ve read a lot of Greek mythology but never met hypoxia. Was she one of the nymphs?
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 🫠
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.
“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.
HR is a funny one; if you know what you’re talking about about and can speak to different audiences at their level it’s not generally push back from a professional knowledge point–pushback for HR is usually “yeah but that is hard/not what I want” which is very different and totally fine.
Except fucking compensation. Glassdoor is the WebMD bane of comp conversations with employees. It’s a selection-bias informed group of people who provide salaries when they think they’re underpaid and need validation. While, for the most part we’re all underpaid, just like WebMD, the dangerous oversimplification of very nuanced and complex data is nothing but a PITA to people trying to to fix or work in good systems.
“I saw my job is being hired for $xx,xxx I should be getting that”. Location, industry, industry segment, education, KSA, org size, high variance in titles from one company to the next(manager here is VP there), every other pay/bonus/benefit/time off difference, internal pay equity considerations that are often statutory by state/feds–none is captured and people aren’t taught that those are part of comp. Just this title is $xx,xxx. The worst part is that managers run to HR with often this info directly supplied by candidates or their own employees all worked up HR is fucking them by underpaying. I’m the first person to tell a manager their comp is fucked against a market if it is, which helps build trust but it’s exhausting.
This plays out in every job offer, promotion, annual merit increase and any time you remind people they’re not coming to work for free.
Again, almost never see this in other areas if you know what the hell you’re doing in HR, but I guess the incentive and stakes are high enough in comp to make people just go off the deep end.
Yes. Because none of my coworkers want to openly admit that they’re just as geeky and autistic about the company IP schema and the routing tables as I.
“Is that NTP server we installed on that ship in Galveston last year available via VPN?”.
“Yup, 172.20.72.21 and its backup is on 172.20.72.22”
Regarding my field of expertise, not usually. I have a very technical expertise (frontend software engineering, backend Node.js, JavaScript in general), so most people I talk to about it are asking me for help or are similarly experienced.
But regarding my experience working in big tech, yes. I get pushback for the strangest things. Like, I’ll be explaining the architecture of some system I worked on at Facebook or something, and someone will tell me that’s not how it works, because they read an article that described it differently. Like, ok sure buddy, I only worked on it for a year. I’ve always found that kind of exchange pretty funny.
Well, the thing is, sometimes I don’t even believe me, despite the better part of two decades of experience.
Impostor syndrome kinda sucks.
But at the same time, I’ve come to be suspicious of any engineer who doesn’t have at least a dash of impostor syndrome. It’s always a good reflex to check your assumptions, imo.
Was chatting with my manager about this last week. A fabricator of mine gave me a bit of back talk about how I wanted them to build something. He asked me why I don’t just put my foot down. Told him that I never want to be in the position where someone knows that I am wrong but is afraid to say something to me. He agreed.
Being approachable is not win-win. You deal with people undermining you but hopefully one of them has a bright idea that makes it worth it.
What you’re describing feels like the Dunning–Kruger effect. When you don’t know you know very little, you have more confidence than you’re likely to have after spending decades on a subject.
When you start asking questions in response you’re likely to pull someone further into realizing what they actually don’t know, killing their confidence. Of course this doesn’t work when they’re being zealots (or otherwise protecting their own sanity)…
Heh, yeah. Spotting DK tendencies is also an important skill, especially when you get to the point where you’re screening candidates for your team. A surprising amount of people think they can just bull through an interview without going into real detail. I have caught more than a few people blatantly misrepresenting their resumes.
Don’t get me wrong - by all means, use a bit of spin to get shit past the HR idiots. When I, as a knowledgeable and experienced engineer, ask you a pointed question about something in particular, I won’t particularly mind if you straight up tell me that you spun that on the res a bit and point out the areas of the domain you’re stronger or weaker. Depending on the context, it might actually work in your favor, because I genuinely appreciate when someone tells me the limits of their knowledge. But if you try to bullshit me, and I catch you, that’s a black mark on your candidacy. And if you keep lying, or try that more than once, I’m going to quickly end the call and remove you from consideration.
I can cite an example for each of the above situations.
