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[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I'm not a subscriber - I only have so many subscription dollars to spend - so I don't have access to the full post. This is unfortunate because from the portion that is public, it looks to be thought-provoking and has obvious relevance for many of us. (emphasis added)


Most people are wrong about most things. This is especially true of the people who are brought to your attention by newspapers and television. It doesn’t matter how smart they are, or how well-read, or how thoroughly educated. There aren’t very many fields of endeavour where you can get ahead on the sheer strength of being right. Our expert classes succeed instead by cultivating the correct allies, publishing the right papers in the right journals, working on the right problems, winning the right grant funding, and making the right friends. People who enjoy these trivialities are precisely the people for whom being right is not a priority.

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Above all, experts prefer to work within and propagate safe, consensus positions. This is because they have primarily careerist goals, which they prefer to pursue secure from the criticism of colleagues. Being wrong is not nearly so important as seeming wrong, which can cost you promotion. Once you realise that experts are little more than consensus-establishing and -propagating professionals, statements about what the science says or what the literature shows acquire a totally new meaning.

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Forget, then, about expert opinion. There is no substitute for doing your own research. In everything that matters to you, you must consider the actual theories that are presented to you for yourself. And, particularly in areas of limited evidence, you’ll be less interested in which theories are wrong (though that matters too), than in the subtler problem, of which theories are more or less probable than the alternatives.

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Most of the theories that are put about, are not really theories at all. They are, instead, arguments, designed to justify or advocate for specific policies. Arguments are not genuine attempts to understand anything; they are attempts to convince other people to think in a certain way.

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People assemble arguments like they would a house. They develop a program (the plan), collect evidence in favour of this thesis (the materials), and finally they present their thesis with all the evidence adduced in neat footnotes (the construction). This approach is reasonable enough, if all you want to do is persuade, but if you want to understand how a given model of reality fares against others, it is the wrong way. ...

[–]InumaGaming Socialist 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I deal with this so much...

Right now, I gotta deal with people that only want to circlejerk about Ukraine and hate fact checking and it depends on me to show why the article is bad.

But then they Gish Gallup so much, it's not worth my time and I just end up letting them see reality when it crashes.

[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

That's frustrating, it's why I tell my friends not to talk politics around me. They think they're "informed" because they read what comes in on their Facebook feed and watch TYT - where to begin....

[–]InumaGaming Socialist 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Oh, I have international friends and I had to watch them fall under the spell of Russian hysteria.

Then there was the times of fighting the uphill battle about how bad the Democratic party was and even the Squad...

I swear, this Cassandra just couldn't catch a break in the last 4 years...

[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Ain't it the truth! I think the difference between us is that you still try and most of the time I don't.