> it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy
Why wouldn't the world be crazy, though? What reason do we have to assume that the world is not crazy? Most reasons are tautological when you really unpack them.
It's correct to say something like "the world is dysfunctional as a system for surfacing truth", and that's kind of like saying the rest of the world is crazy.
On the other, you shouldn't assume "the rest of the world is filled exclusively with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills and that's why they don't agree with me" which is what people usually mean when they say the rest of the world is crazy.
Life has taught me that the vast majority of people out there are in fact average at best.
Competence (let alone extreme competence) is kind of rare actually, and accepting that that is “fine” is part.
That’s why you engineer a car to be driven by a dumb and abusive driver; airplanes are designed to be flown by pilots on their worst days; houses are built with large safety factors; code should be written to handle bugs gracefully. It’s not that anyone is being intentionally malicious, it’s that even competent people sometimes make mistakes so the rest of us should expect to screw up.
For awhile in my life, I was highly competent at what I did. It was awesome - but the altered reality this can engender - the idea that “since I am competent everyone else should be too, I’m just average” has it’s own dangers.
Of course the world is crazy. But so are you
Agreed, but also: Just because they're crazy, it doesn't mean they're wrong.
Depends, if we're being pedantic crazy implies you get some stuff wrong, due to not "being" fully there.
This world is a messy complicated place and I tend to think in percentages about everything. Guarantees are rare, I usually think of events as probabilistic, and likewise what other people say.
Now, these probabilities can change based on who's saying what. Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject. That's what academia is, and if it wouldn't work we wouldn't do it.
So, for me it does matter who's saying what, but only to some extent. That means even the most educated, smart and focused individual can get it wrong, and some nobody with no training on the subject can get it right, for various reasons, even pure chance.
So I'm never discarding someone's opinion based on who the are or their training, but I do consider the chances of them being right or wrong. There was a recent discussion about Nobelitis.
> Theoretically someone who specialized in that topic has a higher chance of "getting it right", or sussing it better than people who aren't as versed in that subject.
Exactly so. The qualifications are a heuristic, not a rule. That said - There are billions of ill-informed halfwits on earth and all or most have opinions.
People need some way to filter all of those opinions, especially now that the media doesn't do it for us. A lossy heuristic that only works most of the time beats the heck out of drowning in an endless sea of babble.