They may be perfectly competent in a certain area that allows them to make a living, but beyond that, they are just floundering around. Point number 2: These people hate it when experts enter a discussion and make it clear that they really don't know what the fuck they are talking about, and that quickly turns into hating the expert. I've learned this the hard way on these public forums because what you'll have is a bunch of people who don't know how any of this works circling the wagons and defending each other. I can know I'm right and they're wrong, but they don't even know enough to understand my explanation of why my advice is right and theirs is wrong. And their heads are so full of misinformation and urban legends, that it's an uphill battle all the way.

You're absolutely right, Julien. Sadly, I've witnessed situations like this on Reddit... I watched a guy who was a professional get downvoted to oblivion once when trying to inject a dose of reality into a conversation among laypeople. Eventually he stopped contributing. It was so frustrating to me, like this person was taking his time to actually give some valuable and otherwise-hard-to-access information! It's one of the reasons why the internet, while an incredible place to start learning, is often a poor place to pick up very specialized knowledge... in-person communication's always gonna be useful for that.

As to the judgment question, I'll go back to what I'd call the narrow competence I mentioned above. People may be perfectly good at what they do for a living, while having very little common sense about anything else. Our modern world of specialization has created many people like this.

That's a great observation. Yes, we do live in a world of specialization. That has its pros and cons. It's funny, there has been such a shift against being a generalist in the US it seems, at a cultural level... I'm on the older end of Gen Z and out of college, but when I was applying for it, being "pointy" or overly specialized was all the rage. And in kids, we're talking... with so little emphasis on situation-generalizable critical thinking skills.

Thanks for sharing your perspective, I appreciate it. Those are some grounding observations.