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?
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.