Study: People with less political knowledge think they know a lot about politics

[ck4829]

28. It's one of the things about living in a 'modern' society

Last edited Tue Apr 17, 2018, 01:53 PM - Edit history (2)

Or one that is 'organic' as opposed to 'mechanical'.

These blind spots are actually functional. Everybody can get really good in a few fields or subjects as opposed to being just maybe nearly adequate in many. I know science, how to teach things like science, math, and English (esp. as a second language) and how to balance the books, but I don't know a single thing about cars for example. There are other people for that.

The problem isn't that there are blind spots, it's knowing our blind spots and it's knowing who to go to when we don't know something.

One problem, and it's not really "both sides" or even political all the time is we see people being derided simply for being something, their expertise is denied and sometimes what they bring to the table is denied outright. Turning "liberal" into a dirty word is an example of this, non-political, accusing Muslims of lying on whatever they speak about (This whole "taqiyya" invention) is an example of that.

Another problem is this "misapplied expertise", and I think it's why we're here with our current political situation today. People who aren't experts and aren't brilliant at all but are being portrayed as such by others (Roy Moore, Sebastian Gorka, David Barton, or John Guandolo anyone?) I think a subfield of this is this "universal fitness" we keep seeing especially in today's political environment and I'm not sure it's both sides either. Things like "He's white, so he must be an expert of any field." "He's rich, so he must be some sort of omnifield super-genius"... How common is that one? Far too much if you ask me.

And I think a third problem is this idea of "secret knowledge", this goes back to those pseudo-experts I mentioned above. The things they say are actually "suppressed truths" that believers think are kept hidden by the government, by the liberals, (liberal) media, "politically correct", and others as opposed to just being gross errors, bigoted statements, pseudoscience, etc. It creates a vicious circle, believers refuse to see their "experts" as not-experts just because it's "those dang liberals" voicing opposition to them and so they are willing to go down with them.