this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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On your latter point, I have taken to calling this "The Death of Expertise". Not only has the state of being an intellectual been diminished to, at best, a hobby, but much of the population legitimately abhors it. This might be something of a narrow view based on my US nationality, but I have been attacked so many times for using "big words to pretend to be better than I am" that I struggle to see it any other way. I have north of a 100k-word vocabulary if you include jargon and other specialization-specific words.
But beyond that, and even worse, in my opinion, is the inherent and immediate distrust I see in experts. People who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of singular branches of knowledge or tasks are summarily dismissed for the very act that makes them the people to listen to. For a personal example, I have an MA in Visual Effects and a BS in Applied Mathematics, making me an expert in VFX and the computational and mathematics principles behind it, when the on-set shooting occurred a couple of years ago with Alec Baldwin, some guy on Facebook suggested in a friend's post that all gunshots in movies should be CGI. I responded with my credentials and laid out not only that it was impossible, but also why in as lay terms as I could. He decided to argue with me that he was right and I should shut up, so I laid down a full mathematical analysis of the best-case scenario of implementing his change, with supporting evidence from industry standards groups, which showed that doing so would mean that every single VFX artist in the world would do nothing but put muzzle flashes on guns and it would leave about 3 man-months worth of time to finish every single other VFX shot for every other movie, TV-show, commercial, and music video. He still told me I was wrong. Toss on all of the 2020 right-wing nut jobs who emphatically believed Anthony Faucci was wrong and stupid when he is literally one of the world's foremost experts I epidemiology and virology, and so many more examples... People just don't know when to sit down and shut the fuck up because they are amongst their betters in some specific topic.