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?

  • Dark ArcAEnglish
    1•2 months ago

    Any doctor worth their salt is going to be able to answer the question “how do you know that?” way better than “I just do” or “I have a medical degree” and that’s the point; I’ve yet to find a problem space where that isn’t the case. I don’t try to win arguments by waiving my credentials around and I don’t expect people to take my for “my word” just because of my credentials.

    There are plenty of people with titles and fancy degrees that are not worth listening to, like the Ohio doctor (that somehow recently got her medical license back) that claimed the COVID vaccine was making people magnetic, Dr. Oz, etc.

    Put another way, do you trust the alleged internet licensed electrician that says a ground wire makes you safer but can’t explain why, the alleged internet licensed electrician that says a ground wire is worthless, or the person that says “fuck who I am, ground wires are important because they allow tying things like a metal mixer’s body to an incomplete circuit, so that if the metal becomes electrified the circuit is instantly completed and the breaker trips. Alternatively, the circuit becomes completed when you touch the metal and you might die before the breaker trips. If you don’t have a ground you can protect humans with a GFCI which detects current loss at the outlet and cuts the power locally. However, a GFCI may not detect some situations that a ground wire would resolve, like an arc that makes use of a grounded portion of the appliance and may generate enough heat to start a fire. AFCIs have been created to help detect this situation. However, both GFCI and AFCI can fail and thus a ground wire is still a useful backup option that also has value for some sensitive electronics.”?

    Most professionals aren’t going to volunteer all of that, but many will volunteer more and more if challenged/questioned.

    For reference, my background is in Software Engineering but my father is an electrician at a factory, and a good friend of mine is a forensic electrical engineer. I have no formal credentials in electrical engineering … but I do know a fair bit about the what and why … because I have been inquisitive, I’ve questioned the experts that I’ve come across to understand their field and learned from them.